Problem with "erase free space" in disk utility

[BMAC5927]

Today I ran the "erase free space" function in Disk Utility. Before I ran it I had about 15GB of free hard drive space. Halfway through the process, an error message popped up saying that the computer was out of hard drive space! I quit disk utility and checked my hard drive. It said "Zero KB Available." However this can't be the case because my computer is running fine. I shut the computer down and started it back up hoping that this would fix the problem but it didn't.

I am on a 2GHz MacBook with 1GB of RAM.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

 

[mkrishnan]

It sounds like there is a file floating around somewhere that was being used to overwrite the erased areas with random numbers. It looks like this file is inside /var/root/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems. See this:

http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/quickie/recovering_from_a_failed_secure_erase_free_space

 

[Stinky-Brain]

helpppp

i was stupid enough to run that erase free space as well thinking it might make my mac a little faster or whatever. no i got from 100GB free space to 10GB. It literally erased my free space :$

I checked a couple blogs online and they all said something about that sparseimage file that had to be deleted, but i have no idea how to use terminal to find it.

help would be a lifesaver right now. thank you!