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what happened to the 10 gb? disk inventory question

biohazard6969

biohazard6969

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 23, 2005
836
0
toronto canada
hey, ok i don't know how many of you have used or even heard of this program. its called Disk Inventory X. it catalogues ur hard drive.

anyways theres a big chunk of my hard drive that it says is being occupied by "other files and folders" (see the pic) its the big grey chunk. anyways i'm just wondering what is taking up that space.

i've tried other disk inventory programs such as "whatsize" and they won't tell me either.

i really would like the space.
 

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I'm a little baffled as to the method you're going about determining what's on your drive, but here's the easiest way to do a quick and dirty catalog:

Using the Finder, get info on each folder on the drive individually. Take notes on the sizes reported. Check #1 is to make sure that the total roughly matches up with the total data on the drive. If it doesn't there's something weird and hidden taking up space, but that's rare.

Step two, assuming the standard system files don't take up an undue amount of space (around 3GB for the OS is normal, and the Applications folder depends on what you've got installed) is to go into the folders you've created (from the looks of it, probably limited to your User folder), and get info on each folder/file (ok, just check the list for the files) there.

When you find a very large item, make sure you know why it's taking up so much space--perhaps you saved a big video file you didn't realize you had or something. Once everything is roughly accounted for, you're good to go.

For example, a quick check might reveal that my System, Library, and Apps folders take up 5GB, and my Users folder takes 10GB. Looking at each item under my user, I find that Movies is 2GB, Music is 3GB, documents is only a couple hundred MB, Library is 500MB, and all the rest is in my "temp junk" folder. When I look in there, I might find that I saved an iMovie project that I'd forgotten about, and I can delete now, or that I just have a bunch of junk on there.
 
ok, so i checked everything and added it up. here's what i got

Users: 25.5 GB
Applications: 5.2 GB
Library: 4.4 GB
System: 1.2 GB
Developer: 804 MB
usr: 684.3 MB
private: 671.6

as well as some other things i added up but too lazy to type in, they were all below 200 mb

anyways it added up to 38.9985 GB, but my hard drive is 60!!!!!!

i guess this means that there is something wrong....

any ideas on how to solve this?
 
haha yea sorry, plus the free disk space (6.6 GB) it comes to a grand total of only 45 GB. that leaves at least 10 GB unanswered for assuming that tiger is taking up about 3 GB
 
Did you ever partition your computer's hard drive, and not format one of the partitions?

Try restarting and add up everything again. Never heard of a 10GB pagefile space... but you never know.
 
no i never partitioned the drive, i dun even know how. i've had this problem with free space for a while now, and didn't bother to post or nething cause i didn't need the space.

this is rele weird i don't know wat to do
 
10GB is being used up by your Windows XP theme. Yikes!

Seriously though..

Unmount all mounted drives/images first.

Use "df" in the terminal to determine how much disk space is used, and use "sudo du -h -d 1" to determine how much space is being used by each directory. Post the results of both here (use code tags please) and we can take a look at it and point at potential size suckers.

Examples:

Code: 
yellow% df -h
Filesystem                Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk3s9              112G    65G    47G    58%    /
devfs                     112K   112K     0B   100%    /dev
fdesc                     1.0K   1.0K     0B   100%    /dev
<volfs>                   512K   512K     0B   100%    /.vol
automount -nsl [312]        0B     0B     0B   100%    /Network
automount -fstab [333]      0B     0B     0B   100%    /automount/Servers
automount -static [333]     0B     0B     0B   100%    /automount/static

Code: 
yellow% sudo du -h -d 1
3.0M    ./--UserScripts
4.0K    ./.Trashes
  0B    ./.vol
 20G    ./Applications
1.5K    ./automount
3.4M    ./bin
  0B    ./Cleanup At Startup
249M    ./Compressed
 16K    ./cores
8.0K    ./Desktop Folder
  0B    ./dev
681M    ./Developer
  0B    ./File Transfer Folder
1.7G    ./Library
 64K    ./Messages Received
8.0K    ./Network
  0B    ./Network Trash Folder
2.4G    ./private
2.1M    ./sbin
585M    ./sw
1.1G    ./System
  0B    ./TheVolumeSettingsFolder
 37G    ./Users
689M    ./usr
4.0K    ./Volumes
 64G    .

There will be a little but missing from the root of the drive, but it shouldn't account for too much. You'll notice that the final output from "du" (64GB) is quite close to the size from "df" (65GB).
 
holy freakin ugly ass theme... god.. i won't even take the time to throw anything useful in here... what a complete bastardization of an OS X install. you should be shot for even attempting to do that... heck, the author of that theme should be put out of his/her misery. such a sad sight.
 
What Yellow said is what you want to do. Try that.

I'll also add, however (in case you weren't already familiar with this) that no matter what is going on with your drive if you have a 60GB (identified by the manufacturer) drive, you will never get 60GB of data (as reported by the OS) on it. This is because hard drive manufacturers use a different standard for "Gigabytes" than OSes (both Mac and Windows), leading to the disk size reported by the OS being a smaller number than what's printed on the label.

As such, if you have a 60GB drive it will hold a total of about 56GB as reported by the OS. That doesn't account for your missing space, it's just a reminder once you find what is using it up.

One note: If it does turn out to be pagefiles somehow errantly left behind that are eating up the space, Panther Cache Cleaner (or Tiger Cache Cleaner, depending) can detele them for you. It'll also do the daily, weekly, and monthly housekeeping to muck out older logs.
 
Code: 
Filesystem              512-blocks      Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s3             116948016 103184312 13251704    89%    /
devfs                          192       192        0   100%    /dev
fdesc                            2         2        0   100%    /dev
<volfs>                       1024      1024        0   100%    /.vol
automount -nsl [206]             0         0        0   100%    /Network
automount -fstab [215]           0         0        0   100%    /automount/Servers
automount -static [215]          0         0        0   100%    /automount/static

Code: 
24K    ./.jmf
 48K    ./.mldonkey
 52K    ./.psi
4.0K    ./.ssh
  0B    ./.Trash
  0B    ./Applications
4.6G    ./Desktop
409M    ./Documents
 33M    ./Incomplete
1.1G    ./Library
5.5G    ./Movies
 11G    ./Music
671M    ./Pictures
  0B    ./Public
1.7G    ./Shared
 28K    ./Sites
 25G    .

there. thats just for the user though i think. cause i don't have 0B in applications, but all my apps are stored for all users instead of just mine

and about the XP theme, i like it. its kind of humbling to know that i can make a replica of XP on a mac so that windows acutally works right. :D
 
biohazard_6969 said:
there. thats just for the user though i think.
Click to expand...

Yeah.. that doesn't help us in this case.. and it's my fault because I missed one critical thing in my above posting.. a trailing slash. Sorry, my bad. Try this again and post back with the results:

EDITED: Mainly because I don't want /dev to give you a false positive on size (that it doesn't actually have), I need you to do this instead:

cd /
sudo du -h -d 1
 
ok, i think this is what u wanted

why does it say it totals like 87 G???? that doesn't seem right.

Code: 
 15M    ./.DataRecycler Folder
 74M    ./.Spotlight-V100
  0B    ./.Trashes
2.0K    ./.vol
5.3G    ./Applications
170M    ./Applications (Mac OS 9)
1.5K    ./automount
3.5M    ./bin
  0B    ./cores
  0B    ./Desktop Folder
2.0K    ./dev
887M    ./Developer
4.5G    ./Library
3.0K    ./Network
435M    ./private
2.2M    ./sbin
1.3G    ./System
189M    ./System Folder
  0B    ./TheVolumeSettingsFolder
  0B    ./Trash
 35G    ./Users
719M    ./usr
 38G    ./Volumes
 87G    .
 
biohazard_6969 said:
ok, i think this is what u wanted

why does it say it totals like 87 G???? that doesn't seem right.

Code: 
 15M    ./.DataRecycler Folder
 74M    ./.Spotlight-V100
  0B    ./.Trashes
2.0K    ./.vol
5.3G    ./Applications
170M    ./Applications (Mac OS 9)
1.5K    ./automount
3.5M    ./bin
  0B    ./cores
  0B    ./Desktop Folder
2.0K    ./dev
887M    ./Developer
4.5G    ./Library
3.0K    ./Network
435M    ./private
2.2M    ./sbin
1.3G    ./System
189M    ./System Folder
  0B    ./TheVolumeSettingsFolder
  0B    ./Trash
 35G    ./Users
719M    ./usr
 38G    ./Volumes
 87G    .
Click to expand...

What's in your /Volumes?
 
yellow said:
Unmount all mounted drives/images first.
Click to expand...


Do that, including ejecting CDs and whatnot.. We want to make sure we're just getting your internal boot drive here.

And then repost the new outputs of:

df -h

and

cd /
sudo du -h -d 1
 
Well, ./Volumes just shows the total size of (other?) mounted volumes, so you can pretty much ignore that number. It's pretty clear comparing the list you just gave and your numbers from the Finder earlier that your unaccounted for 10GB is in your /Users -- you said the Finder reported a total of 25.5GB but I see 35GB below.

Since you already did a detailed check on your user folder and came up with about the same 25GB, that would appear to indicate that the unaccounted for space is in another user. This would make sense, as I don't believe doing a "get info" on /Users will include files you don't own, since the Finder doesn't have permissions for the files, but the sudo'd command above will.

Try logging in as any other users on your machine and see what they've got in their Home folders. Don't forget to have a look at the Shared folder and see if something exists in there that you don't have any permissions for.

If you didn't create any files under other users, it's even possible (though unlikely) that somebody gained access to an account remotely and put stuff there.

You can try doing:
cd /Users
sudo du -h -d 1
...which, I believe, should give you the total size of each user's home folder. But perhaps I should defer to yellow on this, as he clearly knows more than I do about the relevant commands.
 
crap sorry here it is, it only totals 48 GB

Code: 
15M    ./.DataRecycler Folder
 74M    ./.Spotlight-V100
  0B    ./.Trashes
1.0K    ./.vol
5.6G    ./Applications
170M    ./Applications (Mac OS 9)
1.5K    ./automount
3.5M    ./bin
  0B    ./cores
  0B    ./Desktop Folder
2.0K    ./dev
887M    ./Developer
4.5G    ./Library
3.0K    ./Network
243M    ./private
2.2M    ./sbin
1.3G    ./System
189M    ./System Folder
  0B    ./TheVolumeSettingsFolder
  0B    ./Trash
 35G    ./Users
719M    ./usr
 28K    ./Volumes
 48G    .
 
Yes, as I pointed out before, everything is accounted for by the check you ran there (and before), but you seem to have 10GB of data somewhere in your /Users folder that the Finder isn't reporting; the list below shows 35GB in /Users, where before you said the Finder only reports 25.5GB. I thought that 10GB is what you were trying to identify.

In which case, you actually didn't do quite the right thing here; instead of typing "cd /Users", you either put a space after the slash or forgot to type/copy in "Users", so you just re-did the check on the top level of your hard drive.

If you do:
cd /Users
it'll take you to the top level of your Users folder, so when you do:
sudo du -h -d 1
...it should give you a list something like this:

Code: 
1.5M    ./user1
8.7G    ./user2
1.5M    ./user3
8.0K    ./Shared
8.8G    .

...which will tell you if the 10GB that the Finder isn't reporting is in your user folder, or another.

Alternately, if you think you know what everything in that 35GB Users folder is, then you do indeed just need a bigger drive.
 
Code: 
7.7M    ./owner
2.6G    ./Ryan 
4.3G    ./Ryan Phillips
2.1G    ./ryan_phillips
 25G    ./ryanphillips
223M    ./Shared
 35G    .

ok, now this is REALLY weird. i only have 2 functional accounts on my computer, one entitled Ryanphillips, and the other is Owner. but in the users folder i found that there were these: Ryan Phillips; ryan_phillips; ryanphillips....why are these here. these are obviously the source of the missing GB. i used to have users named this, but i thought i deleted them. since it looks as though i didn't delete them properly, how can i see what is in them. it says i don't have sufficient privilages. i want to make it an account again just to see if there is anything important in them. is there any way to do this?
 
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