No Disk Space After Failed Disk Utility Erase Free Space

[steiney]

I really appreciate you writing all this helpful info!

For the record, I got the problem fixed the day that it happened. Disk Utility had written the complete "Zero's" temporary file, and then froze. I force quit it, but that caused the 0's file to get "lost".

I ended up finding a terminal code to delete that specific file, did and rebooted the computer so that it would recognize the newly freed space, and I was good to go.

I verified my disk and found that there were a couple errors, so I still need to pop in disk 2 and do a repair. I keep putting it off, which is probably not a good practice.

Anyway, thanks for the help.

Update: Oh man, I'm didn't read the stuff before your comment. I thought you were responding to me. My bad.

[bbowm010]

what was the terminal code?

[ElDiabloConCaca]

To remove a file from the Terminal, type:

rm <filename>

...where <filename> is the full, escaped path and filename of the file you wish to delete.

If the file is not owned by your user account, you may need to prefix that command with "sudo", like so:

sudo rm <filename>

...and enter you root/adminsitrator password when prompted.

[ancientscream]

best not doing this operation on a drive with any data you care about on it, ie do it on a new drive or a drive which is damaged you are trying to bring back into full operation and run this on such a drive just after formatting, before any data is put on the drive.

the thing that is most disturbing is that for most of the free space erase operation you were getting a countdown but now it just says

"creating temporary file"

and no other feedback, is it paused is it in trouble ? but if you open a window at the root of the drive in question or check the amount available in disk utility you will note that disk space available on the drive is continuing to diminish, in my case i continue to wait until it has filled the drive and there is no free space then it should finish with its temporary file operation, and then go through a fresh phase of "erasing free space" but although this initially sais its going to take 12 days or something its lying and it rapidly (12mins or so more time on a 500gb 2.5" drive) diminishes down to a normal time frame at this point with your free space re-appearing, and finishes up, its just the feedback of whats happening its very poor at, in this part of the process.

If you are left with allot less free space after the process has actually finished, then just reformat once more(presuming you have nothing of value data wise on the drive?) but in all honesty if you bail out at this point it wont remove the temporary file, you have to use the falling free space as a kind of feedback as to what is going on.

as mr pollock suggests i tend to do this operation on a suspect drive or a new one if i want to lock off bad blocks, by forcing the drive to write to zeros to every location on the drive that is free, in my case a freshly formatted drive meaning zero the entire drive, which provokes the drives internal repair routines to remove and hide from use any bad blocks that cant be written to successfully, which is my intention, I tend never to do this operation on a drive that contains any data that is important to me, if you want to get rid of data permanently that has been erased its better to do a secure erase of the files in question in the first place, or use an secure erasing tool on the files in question rather than zero the free space as it is not so secure, erase free space for me should be used as a kind of bad block/cluster remover/ prompter to the drives internal repair routines only.

ancient