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Question: 80 Gig HD, completely filled, unknown how it happened...

robbents99

robbents99

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 15, 2001
114
0
Directly under the sun....now.
This is going to be an odd question and I'm assuming this is the right place for it, if not, Mods, my apologies in advance, feel free to move it....anyway: My friend has a Rev A 15" G4 Pbook with an 80 Gig HD running 10.3.8 (no classic) He thought he had 20 gigs left but all of sudden he's getting error message: Startup Disk is full, operation cannot be complete in Safari. This was due to him not having any space left on his HD. Disk Utility runs, gets to 90% and just sits there...

He isn't a photoshop phreak and doesn't video edit, just surfs the net via Safari and empties the cache every single night. We managed to get a 1.54 Gigs of free space so he can begin to burn stuff off of his HD. His iPhoto isn't overflowing and his iTunes is about 4gigs or so. And his porn collection is minisucle.

So my question is: Does anyone have any suggestions on where to look for a big honking file that can take up all this space? He downloaded Virex tonight, I doubt there are any viruses....
 
Check /var/log for really large archived log files.

Try running the usual cleanup scripts

sudo periodic daily
sudo periodic weekly
sudo periodic monthly

Also, is he a big time P2P user? Some programs will allocate the space before the file downloads.
 
I had that happen to me before just check your log files and dump the one that seems unnaturaly large. I have no idea how this occurs thoug and it only happened once about 3 years ago so I have no worries.
 
I once had a similar problem once where I had 1 gig left on my HD when I knew I had at least two on it a few hours prior (Aie aie aie - I need to update). But all I had to do was log out and log back in and everything was fine.
 
i think he had to talk about the porn cuz if he didn't that would be the most likely source ....
 
if file vault is enabled, restart and click continue when it asks you if you want to recover disk space. i've saved about 10 Gb doing that before :cool: :D
--andrzej
 
I'm assuming the free space "disappeared" after installing the update to 10.3.8?
If so, the following might be your problem (and solution):

(from http://www.macosrumors.com/20050211C.php)
Stephen Widdows experienced an issue with the MacAlly iShock game controller driver which we also had, but seem to have cured without deleting the driver by simply deleting /var/log/system.log and carefully monitoring for a repeat of the issue, which hasn't happened yet: After updating to 10.3.8 I found that my main hard drive was full with zero space left. It turned out to be the Macally iShock game pad driver. I deleted the driver and system log and restarted with the help of apple support.

(Lacero's comment helped me find the info, I knew I had heard of the problem but couldn't remember the cause)
 
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