danielholmes
Registered
My Girlfriend was losing space on her iMac even though she was deleting files and not putting in any more files. She is running Mac OSX Tiger. So she used a program to find large files, which found her sparseimage file in her user directory, it was 220GB. So she deleted it. I was on messenger at the same time to her and told her frantically not to delete it so she rushed away and shut off her computer before i could tell her not to shut it down either. Now she can't login to her account. She mentioned to me she uses secure delete in her trash which means it deletes it for good or something like that.
There are many many posts on this but we got to a point that non of them mention. We have done all the disk repair using Disk Utility and fsck operations as well as starting in safe mode but none found anything or helped.
I was able to find the sparseimage file by booting up in single user mode with the unix command line. It is inside /.Trashes/501/Lava ##-##-##.sparseimage (I forgot the actual numbers and aren't in front of the computer right now, they seemed random). Various posts tell of copying this file to an external hard drive to try and recover or moving it to the Users/Lava directory, but I was unable to do either. When i try a mv or a cp I get an error:
None of the posts mentioned this but I feel this is perhaps something that could be resolved with a lower level unix command? I tried a chmod and chgrp on the file but still nothing. Perhaps the extremely large file size has something to do with it as i was also unable to find any posts related to a file so big - the biggest ive read about is around 40GB. Her disk says there's only 100MB left.
We have 2 other user accounts which do work, one with administrator privlidges the other without. Booting up and logging in to these doesn't seem to provide any help; I can't see the sparseimage file.
On a low level, we need a way to copy that sparseimage file to an external harddrive or to her user directory, is there a way for it to stop being flagged as a read-only file system file? On a higher level, any advice about sorting this would be rgeatly appreciated.
Thanks
There are many many posts on this but we got to a point that non of them mention. We have done all the disk repair using Disk Utility and fsck operations as well as starting in safe mode but none found anything or helped.
I was able to find the sparseimage file by booting up in single user mode with the unix command line. It is inside /.Trashes/501/Lava ##-##-##.sparseimage (I forgot the actual numbers and aren't in front of the computer right now, they seemed random). Various posts tell of copying this file to an external hard drive to try and recover or moving it to the Users/Lava directory, but I was unable to do either. When i try a mv or a cp I get an error:
Code:
Read-only file systemNone of the posts mentioned this but I feel this is perhaps something that could be resolved with a lower level unix command? I tried a chmod and chgrp on the file but still nothing. Perhaps the extremely large file size has something to do with it as i was also unable to find any posts related to a file so big - the biggest ive read about is around 40GB. Her disk says there's only 100MB left.
We have 2 other user accounts which do work, one with administrator privlidges the other without. Booting up and logging in to these doesn't seem to provide any help; I can't see the sparseimage file.
On a low level, we need a way to copy that sparseimage file to an external harddrive or to her user directory, is there a way for it to stop being flagged as a read-only file system file? On a higher level, any advice about sorting this would be rgeatly appreciated.
Thanks
