Half of my disk space has vaporized

C

ckarmel

Registered
My iMac (OS10.3.9) has 74.52GB HD , with 37GB used. I started getting messages about 'insufficient Application Hard Disk space'. Re-boots only temporarily solve the problem - the system seems to have genuinely run out of disk space.

Finder/Get Info reports 74.52 total, with 39.38GB available (I deleted a few files to make room, it was at 37GB).

That is, the disk seems to have only half the reported capacity. No data has been lost, and the machine is otherwise (apparently) normal.

OmniDisk Sweeper (downloaded it to study this problem) reports only 20.5GB in use. Perhaps it doesn't count iTunes and iPhoto files. That would make it 35GB or so. (I may have those libraries in Shared Folder, which it might not have found.)

I'm wondering if this could be some sort of 'RAID' that was set up by default or accident on my part, and that Finder is confused, or possibly a "Previous System" from when the iMac was running OS10.1. It's too erie that the disk seems to be split in half.

Journalling is on. Disk Permissions have been scanned and fixed where required (and hasn't fixed or changed the issue).
I checked the space consumed by iPhoto (4.8GB) and iTunes (6.8GB) just in case their storage was in a different file system.

Console.log and system.log are relatively small (1.28k and 28.5k). I'm not expert in evaluating them, but they don't appear strange to me.

Machine is iMac 800MHz Power PC with 512MB SDRAM.

Anyone have any ideas of what the problem might be, or of other tests I could do to isolate the problem?

Thanks

Clay
 
Firefox one time, I think IE another. Mail was also active one time, but not the other. I saw the message while logged-in as two different users (both times as the only user logged in).

Clay
 
Also do some maintenance on the Mac (OS X style). i could teach you all the mired command lines you could use but it would be about 3 pages long. So go and download a program called Yasu (Yet another system utility). This program follows the simple command line system flow to do said maintenance. Just be careful of clearing the system logs because you will loose all the past dealings you Mac has done.
 
Thanks, MisterMe and Satcomer.

I'm skeptical that the problem is randomly saved files because the used space is so specifically 'half' of the hard drive total space. It would just be too freaky of a cooincidence that I'd saved that many files, particularly since 35GB of user files is HUGE by my standards.

I'll download the utility you suggest, Satcomer (but I think I'll back up to an external drive first ;-) ).

The things I've been wondering about are:
1) hard drive failure (half the capacity gone for real),
2) hard drive mis-reporting size,
3) RAID turned on (does HFS support RAID? How would I know if it was on?)
4) an upgrade issue from 10.1 or 10.2 to 10.3.9 which needed to support the new file system, and didn't release the old space fully (so that the OS is confused about whether it is available or not).

Do any of those make any sense to either of you?

Thanks very much for the guidance.

Clay
 
Another possibility is to reinstall the most recent combo update to Mac OS X for your version. If you have 10.3.9 for example, download and install the 10.3.9 combo update.
 
Macworks,

If it turns out that I really AM within 1G of full capacity, I don't think I have room to download the update. (Can I download it to Firewire attached storage?)

Is your idea that the update would revisit disk usage and possibly fix/find the remaining space?

One other notion that comes to mind is that perhaps I should upgrade to 10.4 and hope that finds and fixes the problem. (Seems like a 'hail mary').

Thanks for your help.

Clay
 
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