Help!!!......

buc99

buc99

Don't Tread on Me!
My OSX partition has dropped from ~2.5 G to 238 kb! Can anyone help me with this. I have been having strang crashing problems lately and I thought it may have been due to Office v.X since that was the app giving the most troubles. I also don't understand the crashes since top says I have more than 250M of ram available. I tried to run Drive 10 but it was unable to write to this partition but that may have been because this OS was on this mounted partition. Is there a terminal way to check my drive? Is there some hidden Unix places I should be looking? What happened to this Partition? I have three partitions on a TiBook with 512 M of ram. All my data partitions are on a different partition than my OS, but alot of the Unix stuff I have installed is on this partition (ie., Mysql, Xfree86, etc ...). I had over 2.5 G on this partition just last week, then I started having all of these crashes. Before this my OSX hadden been very stable. (I have been with OSX almost exclusively since PB). I think someone else had a similar problem before, But I can't remember where to look in the terminal to find the problem. Also, can someone explain this line from top:

PhysMem: 39.4M wired, 63.7M active, 196M inactive, 300M used, 212M free

Specifically:
What is wired?
What is the difference between active and inactive?
And if I have so much free, why is not being accessed when my apps crash?
Is the crash because of the lost drive space?

Thanks in advance for your help
:)

SA
 
I ran fsck -y under single user mode. It had some things pop up that were fixed.

I then rebooted and ran Norton Utilities (beta) and disk doctor is telling me that every file on my OSX drive has a bad creation date and that this should be fixed. I'm not going to fix it yet until I hear back from this thread. Any ideas?

Thanks,:)
SA
 
It's possible that some huge error log files are being created. Open up your Console and see if it's generating nonstop error messages.
I would definitely not trust NU beta on those creation dates.
In the Terminal, try:
cd /
ls -a
and you can see which directories are bigger than they should be. The "-a" will show you invisibles as well as visibles.
BTW, in OS X it is unlikely that mere shortage of available RAM will cause an application to crash.
 
A couple of directories to check after many crashes are ~/Library/Logs where CrashReporter puts the logs of crashes, and /private/cores where core files may end up.

You might also want to check /private/var/tmp and see if anything there is overly large (there will be files starting with IntlDataCache which will be six megs each).
 
I tried ls -la on / and did not see a whole bunch of stuff out of whack. I found some virtual disks Norton Utilities (beta) created. I think this product is unreliable and therefore removed it and files it created. This freed up another 70MB. I was checking out /var/tmp and found the following:

-rw------- 1 root wheel 11564 Feb 7 13:16 IntlDataCache.0
-rw------- 1 montana wheel 11564 Feb 7 15:55 IntlDataCache.501
-rw------- 1 root wheel 19720 Feb 7 13:16 IntlDataCache.sbdl.0
-rw------- 1 montana wheel 19720 Feb 7 15:55 IntlDataCache.sbdl.501
-rw------- 1 root wheel 6363236 Feb 7 13:16 IntlDataCache.tecx.0
-rw------- 1 montana wheel 6363236 Feb 7 15:55 IntlDataCache.tecx.501

Any ideas what this is?
Any other ideas on how to fix this problem without re-installing OSX?
If I have to re-install OSX, do I need to re-format this partition?

Thanks,
:)
SA
 
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