Help Please! 100GB of Hard Drive gone!

T

timburke

Registered
Hi,

I am experiencing an interesting and annoying problem. I am running OS X 10.5.6 I have (or had) a 160GB hard drive. The computer is less than a year old and I have very little on it. I had almost 100GB free on my hard drive then all of a sudden it disappeared so that I had 0 space left. Of course the computer started running very poorly so I freed up about 6GB of Hard disc space but I can't figure out where the other space went.

I tried loading programs like Whatsize and Applejack to fix the problem or figure out where all the space went, but when I try to install them I get a message that says "the following disc image failed to mount, no mountable file systems." I know these files are not corrupt...

I have also run disc utilities. When I run Verify Disc Permissions and Repair Disc Permissions, these run but they do list some "permissions differ", I dont know if this is normal of not. When I run Verify disc it stops running and says "First Aid failed" "The volume Macintosh HD needs to be repaired".

Yes, my trash is empty!

Thanks for any information and guidance you can give me!
 
I've heard of this happening several times before. Usually it is due to an application that is having problems and it is writing an error message to a log over and over continuously until the log gets so big that it fills up your drive.

Running these two free utilities will usually clear out the log or cache that has ballooned, allowing your Mac to run normally for a while, at least until the log or cache fills up your drive again:

MacJanitor (Free)
http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/macjanitor.html

Cache Out X (Free.)
http://www.trilateralsystems.com/cacheoutx/

Once you have run these, you need to find out what is causing the problem.

DiskInventory X (free)
http://www.derlien.com/

or

GrandPerspective (free)
http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

will show you which file have balooned and are now taking up all of your disk space.

Usually this will be a log files. Once you have found which log file is growing, you can read it with one of these.

Console (part of OS X)
Applications/Utilities/Console.app

or

LogSurfer (free)
http://www.turingart.com/lgsurfer_lan__en.htm

The offending log file will probably have the same error message over and over, from a particular application.

Launch Activity Monitor (in the same folder as Console), choose the offending application, and click on the icon for "Stop Process". Now delete that application and reinstall a fresh copy.

I know that this all sounds scary, but it is really quite easy.
 
Thanks for the help Randy! But my other problem that I am having now is that I can't load any programs such as Whatsize or MacJanitor. When i download them and then try to run them I get a message that says "The following disc images failed to mount" " no mountable file systems".
 
timburke said:
Thanks for the help Randy! But my other problem that I am having now is that I can't load any programs such as Whatsize or MacJanitor. When i download them and then try to run them I get a message that says "The following disc images failed to mount" " no mountable file systems".
Click to expand...

Try this and see if it helps that problem.

Restart your Mac, and hold down the Shift key right after the startup chime is played, and keep it held down until the spinning black bar cursor appears.

This procedure invokes what Apple calls a "Safe Boot":
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1417
and your Mac will report that it has been booted (started up) into Safe Boot mode. It will ask for your administrator password during startup, even if it normally does not.

During startup in Safe Boot mode your Mac will do a file system check (also known as "fsck"), entirely in the background, with no working status indicated, or report generated, and certain caches will be cleared.

It may take a while for your Mac to start up in Safe Boot mode. Be Patient. Once it has fully started up, your display's resolution may be different than normal. Don't change it. At this point you should immediately restart your Mac normally.

Hopefully this will get your Mac working well enough so that you can follow my other instructions.
 
Restarting in safe mode did not help. I am still unable to run MacJanitor. Another interesting point that I forgot to mention is that when I restart my computer, I receive a message that is titled Disc Insertion and says "The disc you inserted was not readable by the computer." I have no disc in the CD drive. Thanks for the help.
 
Do you have a recent backup of your hard drive? Or is your Mac functional enough to make one?

I fear that you may be forced to erase your drive, install a fresh version of the OS, and then restore your software and files from your backup.

Unless you can find a way to run the utilities that will allow you to find the file that is filling up your Mac's hard drive, and delete it, I can't think of any other options.
 
I always keep OmniDiskSweeper around for such cases. If you can't install it because there's not enough free space, it can be run from a USB stick as long as you manage to boot to the Finder. It shows you where on the harddrive space is wasted and lets you directly delete from within the application itself. Of course you have to pay attention not to delete anything important.
 
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