Hard drive space is disappearing. What the...?

T

toygasm4u

Registered
Hello all,
I have a Powerbook G4, 1.67, 2G memory, Dual Layer, 17". I have the 120G hard drive split into two partitions, one at 25G for the OS, and the other has all my media on it; iTunes, movies, iPhoto, etc.

My problem is that the OS partition keeps shrinking, and I can't seem to figure out why. Finder and iStat Pro both report that I've used 16.7G and have 8G free, but when I open my OS partition in Finder and do a "calculate all sizes", I only show a total of 12.5G being used.

I've looked into programs like What Size, Omni, Disk Inventory X, etc. I've run Cache Out and Mac Janitor; I even deleted my preferences folder. No luck. Where's 4 Gigs gone to? Checked my .trashes, ran Monolingual and deleted all the foreign stuff. Still, missing about 4 Gigs.

The only thing I found in What Size was a 2 Gig "sleep image" file, but it wouldn't let me delete it. I also understand that there's a portion of the drive that's reserved for hidden system files and the like, but dayum... seems like a large chunk of my OS partition has vanished, and the amount of free space shrinks daily for no apparent reason.

Ran through the forums here, and haven't come across anything new to try. Any ideas?
 
The sleepimage file is for saving the RAM content when the computer's going to sleep. You don't want to delete that, since it's going to come back the next time you send the computer to sleep, anyway.

Are you _sure_ that OmniDiskSweeper, for example, doesn't find the missing 4 GB? *I* guess it's virtual memory taking up that space.
 
looking at the root directory in Omni, the only item that doesn't show up is /private, and the only file in there that's large is the sleep image file. Maybe this is just more of a mental block for me because my free space is getting under 8 Gigs, but it seems like over the past week my free space is just shrinking inexplicably. At first, I thought virtual PC was messing with me, but it's totally accounted for in Finder. The /system directory is 1.1 Gigs, but again, it doesn't seem to change that much regardless of activity or time.

iStat says 16.7 Gigs used, Finder says 12.5. Perhaps I'm just nit-picking because my OS partition is so small to begin with. I don't know. I'll monitor it some more over the next couple of days and see what happens.
 
There are a number of utilities including Applejack that will clean up virtual memory on restart ... so that would answer that question.
 
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