Un-Accessible Hard Drive Space

[Beat w/ Stick]

All right before you tell me that the advertised drive space is more than the usable drive space, know this - i have a 120 gig HDD, which gives me about 111 gigs of real space, i know that.
now look at this:

as you can see - my total used space should equal around 27 gigs, but WhatSize says i have 41 gigs used. since WhatSize ays my total disk space is about 111 gigs, that means that regular space restrictions are accounted for. so the 14 gigs or so must be somewhere on the drive. does anyone know how to get this space back (ive checked search and got zip)? if not, do you think formatting will help? (im planning on getting snow leopard when i go and back up the things i want to keep since i only want to keep a few files and apps, not everything)
any help would be greatly appreciated

 

[BlueRevolution]

Have you checked Disk Utility's partition tab?

 

[Beat w/ Stick]

despite how much i like your 1984 partition name scheme, that didn't help my problem. DU says the same thing that whatsize does - 29.2 gigabytes free and no other partitions. any other ideas

 

[BlueRevolution]

Wait... I just took a closer look at your numbers.

Macintosh HD: 40.9 GB used + 29.9 GB free = 70.8 GB
Untitled (your Boot Camp partition I assume): 25.9 GB used + 14.6 GB free = 40.5 GB

70.8 GB + 40.5 GB = 111.3 GB

The math looks all right to me. If you have no other partitions, what's Untitled doing there?

 

[Beat w/ Stick]

well, untitled is my windows partition under boot camp.
also - if you look at the red numbers to the right - the gist of my HD usage, and add them up, you get less than 41 gigabytes used (relatively a lot less).
your math is correct, but you looked at the wrong numbers. compare the red numbers to the used space - very noticeable discrepancy right?

the reason i make a big deal about 14 gigabytes is because its a relatively small drive

 

[BlueRevolution]

Ahh, I see the problem. I'm not sure what to tell you. Have you restarted the computer? Part of that could be virtual memory...

Also, try another disk inventory app, like OmniDiskSweeper. WhatSize may be misreporting.

 

[Beat w/ Stick]

thanks for trying, but no dice. finder, grandperspective, whatsize, and diskinventory x say the same thing, and restarting just doesn't help either
thanks for trying though

 

[Guiyon]

Launch "/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app", type in the below command, hit enter and post the final output here:

sudo du -hcxd1 /

 

[Thiol]

Hidden files aren't added to the sums in that summary you showed. The biggest culprit is usually /private. You might want to check what you have there.

 

[Thiol]

Oh, also, I highly recommend Disk Inventory X to figure out where you file usage is going.

 

[Beat w/ Stick]

@Thiol - doesn't the picture i posted already show the /private folder (4th item down on list)
@Guiyon - here are the results

4.0K	/$RECYCLE.BIN
 36K	/.fseventsd
152M	/.Spotlight-V100
  0B	/.Trashes
  0B	/.vol
2.6G	/Applications
7.4M	/bin
 27M	/CHSI
  0B	/ControlPanelDB
  0B	/cores
512B	/dev
1.0K	/home
9.2G	/Library
  0B	/msdownld.tmp
1.0K	/net
  0B	/Network
3.4G	/private
8.0K	/Recycled
5.3M	/sbin
 62M	/sw
3.6G	/System
 19G	/Users
1.1G	/usr
 16K	/Volumes
 40G	/
 40G	total

now thats interesting - my users folder shows much more usage - about the same as the discrepancy i found. thanks for the tip. now does anyone know how to figure out what that giant chunk of "invisible" data is?

 

[Thiol]

@Thiol - doesn't the picture i posted already show the /private folder (4th item down on list)
@Guiyon - here are the results

4.0K	/$RECYCLE.BIN
 36K	/.fseventsd
152M	/.Spotlight-V100
  0B	/.Trashes
  0B	/.vol
2.6G	/Applications
7.4M	/bin
 27M	/CHSI
  0B	/ControlPanelDB
  0B	/cores
512B	/dev
1.0K	/home
9.2G	/Library
  0B	/msdownld.tmp
1.0K	/net
  0B	/Network
3.4G	/private
8.0K	/Recycled
5.3M	/sbin
 62M	/sw
3.6G	/System
 19G	/Users
1.1G	/usr
 16K	/Volumes
 40G	/
 40G	total

now thats interesting - my users folder shows much more usage - about the same as the discrepancy i found. thanks for the tip. now does anyone know how to figure out what that giant chunk of "invisible" data is?

Disk Inventory X.

 

[Beat w/ Stick]

i found the source of the problem. i used that terminal command to search the drive, and it turns out that my sisters account had a ton of stuff she forgot about that i could not access. she logged on and deleted it and bam - space came back. thanks for the help everybody