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Partition size problem/question

W

wadama

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 7, 2009
4
0
Hello everyone,

I'm fairly new to Mac, but experienced windows and linux user.

I have a MacBook Pro 15" Unibody with a 320GB hard drive.

Disk Utility shows:
Capacity: 297.6 GB (319,594,762,240 Bytes)
Available: 121.2 GB (130,086,342,656 Bytes)
Used: 78.7 GB (84, 527,804,416 Bytes)

I'm missing 97.7 GB.

Interestingly enough, running 'df -h' at a terminal reports:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2 200Gi 78Gi 121Gi 40% /

Also I found in some other posts that running Disk Inventory X may help find where disk space is going.. so I downloaded that and it shows my Capacity is 199.9GB.

Anyone have ideas as to why this is?

Thanks.
 
yeah.. that would explain why my 320 GB drive has a capacity of 297.6 GB

but if I add the available space of 121.2 GB and the used space of 78.7 GB together I get 199.9 GB

297.6 - 199.9 = 97.7

where did that 97.7 GB go?
 
Here's what I'd do. Go into Terminal.

Code: 
cd /
sudo du -sk * | sort -n

That will list your directories in order from most used space to least in KB. You can then cd into the largest directory and run the same command to keep drilling down.

My first guess would be /var/log is big.
 
BlueRevolution said:
A useful command, but you're not answering the question either.
Click to expand...

Sure I did. Nobody here can magically say where 97GB of disk space went to without diving in further. He wants to know where the other space went, and it's most likely in directories not normally viewable without the assistance of Terminal.

If the OP finds 90GB in /var, he found where the space went. It's just a matter of searching for all the space and seeing where it is.
 
Wow, you guys are really fast.. Thank you for your quick replies.

BlueRevolution:

Disk Utility was what was giving me the information in my first post. What was interesting is that Disk Utility was the only tool showing me the capacity was 297GB.

Every other tool (Get Info, Disk Inventory X, and 'df' from terminal) was telling me the disk capacity was 199GB.

belvdr: Awesome command! although I didn't have files stealing the space. It appeared to be a file system size vs. partition size problem.

I have resolved the discrepancy by using Disk Utility to set the partition size to 250GB and then increasing it back to 297GB. Now Get Info, Disk Inventory X, and df -h are showing 297GB as the disk size.

After correcting this I remembered that when I received this machine (it is a work machine), it was configured with a 200GB partition and a 97GB partition for backup. Shortly thereafter, I set up an external USB drive for backups and used Disk Utility to delete the 97GB partition and expand the 200GB partition to use the entire disk.

It would seem to me that somehow the partition was resized to 297GB, but the filesystem was not expanded to fill the partition.

This is the only thing I can think of that would cause the issue that I experienced.

But it is corrected now and again I appreciate your quick responses to my topic.

Thanks.
 
In Disk Utility, rather than selecting the partition name (Probably "Macintosh HD"), select the hardware device it belongs to, then select the Partition tab to the right.

I'd be curious if you possibly have something weird going on with unused partition space. Make sure the "dragable partition resizer" under "Volume Scheme" is not somewhere different than "100%", that is, one partition taking up the entire panel.

I hope that makes SOME sense. Your situation does sound weird...

Edit: Looks like you fixed it!
 
Glad to hear you discovered the issue. It's always good to note that extending a partition doesn't extend the filesystem on any system.
 
belvdr said:
Glad to hear you discovered the issue. It's always good to note that extending a partition doesn't extend the filesystem on any system.
Click to expand...

True. But Disk Utility was used both times.. I wonder why it failed to extend the filesystem the first time..
 
wadama said:
True. But Disk Utility was used both times.. I wonder why it failed to extend the filesystem the first time..
Click to expand...

I'm guessing the first time, it extended the partition. The second time, it realized there was free space in the current partition and extended the filesystem.
 
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