Ok, I've just bought a second mac - little cheapie to use as a second machine. The guy had it set up with three drives showing on the desktop: OSX, CLASSIC and FILES. I don't need OS9/Classic, or the FILES folder, so I threw them in the trash & emptied it. However, it's showing that I only have 4gig of space on the hard drive. I went into system prefs/disc utility, and it's still showing the drives I deleted - although greyed out. Its seems to still be allocating them 5.9gb each of space.... In the column on the left in disc utility, it shows the following drive icons: 19.1 GB MAXTOR 92049U3 OSX CLASSIC FILES I tried deleting them through utility, but I must have done something wrong, as they just popped up on my desktop again. Any ideas....? Looks like I need to remove partitions.....
Do you have three drives or one drive that is partitioned into three partitions? My guess is the later. If you drag a partition to the trash under Mac OS X, you only unmount the partition or HD. They will appear on the desktop after you restart your Mac. If you go to Disk Utilities, and you see the three partitions under the disk, then the only way that I know of, without using special software, to delete the partitions is to re-partition and/or re-format the HD. Also, you can mount a partition via Disk Utilities. After you select a partition, you then click on the mount button. If on the other hand, you have three internal drives, you might want to consider getting a larger drive if all three do not provide enough space.
Delete the two extra partitions with Disk Utility. Then you'll need to resize the main partition, but I don't know if Disk Utility can do that (without losing data, I mean). I'd consider a reinstall, that gets rid of all kinds of junk