Viewing HD usage/layout

[Hugh Macdonald]

Hi all...

I'm having an issue with partitioning for BootCamp at the moment, and I *think* I know what's causing it and the potential solution....

I think that it's refusing to partition because something immovable is in the last 5Gb of space. If I were on Windows (sorry!), I'd defragment the drive which would, at the same time, put everything at the start of the disk, leaving a nice big chunk of empty space at the end.

However, OSX doesn't let you defragment, and I can understand apple's reasoning that it's not needed (in most cases)

So....

Is there any way of seeing what files/applications are where on the physical disk? I've got 40Gb free at the moment, and ideally only want 10Gb for my XP partition (I'm only wanting to install XP for one single application here...)

Any ideas or thoughts on this?

My next option is to create a disk image of my entire main drive (60Gb), save it to one of my external drives (which can quite happily take it) and then format and restore from the image. This scares me, though....

 

[OttawaGuy]

Disk Inventory X
http://www.derlien.com/

Disk Inventory X is a disk usage utility for Mac OS X 10.3 (and later). It shows the sizes of files and folders in a special graphical way called "treemaps".

http://www.wheresthefreespace.com/about/
WheresTheFreeSpace® is a powerful and flexible harddisk space manager for Macintosh OS X. Find out where all the disk space is on your computer with WheresTheFreeSpace® This disk management software made exclusively for Mac users will tell you exactly which files on your hardrive are taking up the most space with bar graphs and the ability to go directly the folders to erase unimportant, space wasting files. WheresTheFreeSpace® can be started from the context menu of a folder or drive and shows you the size of this folder, including its subfolders.

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/
OmniDiskSweeper is a Mac OS X utility for quickly finding and deleting big, useless files and thus making space on your hard disks. OmniDiskSweeper makes this easy by highlighting the biggest files on your disks, and by noting which files are used by the system, so you don't accidentally delete important files.


http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iDefrag.php

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/223638/

 

[Hugh Macdonald]

Thanks OttawaGuy...


I've already tried Disk Inventory X - it shows me where the space is being eaten up, but not physically where on the disk it's being used from.

iDefrag, however, looks like it's exactly what I need. I'll have a look at it and make sure...



Hmmm... this is worrying...

The demo version (which I was hoping would tell me what could be done even if it wouldn't actually do it without me buying it) is saying:

Unable to open volume

Unable to open volume; HFS errors:

hfs_journal.c:95 (from 0x55ac4):
(12) The journal header seems incorrect

I'll get in touch with them in the morning....