new Hitachi 7200 RPM 300GB HARD DRIVE unexpectantly full....I need help!

R

Renzo38

Registered
Hello everyone,

I upgraded my Mac Book Pro hard drive to a Hitachi 7200RPM 300GB Hard Drive in November. All of a sudden my Hard drive is full and I cannot explain why. I retrieved the folder size info from the six folders I have on my HD and it claims that I have filled up roughly 100GB on the hard drive. I understand the MAC OS X is roughly 4-5GBs, roughly another 15GB for threading the utility files, so I should still have at least 180GB of space free on the hard drive. I recently downloaded the application known as AZUREUS aka VUZE could this app have put some extraordinarily large hidden folders on my hard drive? I deleted this app but my HD is still stating that I have used up 278GB of space which I know cannot be right. Can anyone out there help me with this situation? I am lost and upset not sure what is going on. According to my hard disk utility I only have 2.6GB of space availble which is insane!

One more note around xmas I found that my MAC had crashed unexpectedly but is working fine right now expect for the fact the HD is full and I can only see roughly 100GB of files on my 300GB Hard drive.

Please help if you can I greatly appreciate any insight to this problem.
 
Hmmm . . . hath thee done any basic maintenance, such as use Onyx--freeware--or Cocktail? Those programs allow you to do such without entering into Terminal.

I have had a similar problem--but not to that extent. Maintenance handled it.

You can also boot-up under your Installation Disks --> Disk Utility --> and see what it says about the HD. Does it say it has that much "stuff" on it?

--J.D.
 
Have you recently done an Archive & Install? Doing so creates a Previous System folder, in other words a duplicate System. That can occupy a large chunk, but nothing like the 120 figure you've calculated. If you find a Previous System folder, you can safely delete it if you're satisfied the current OS is behaving as it should.

When you deleted the Vuze application, did you do so via Trash, or with a third-party deleting application like CleanApp or AppCleaner? I recommend using the second method because it searches out all the files associated with the application, some of which have bizarre names or numbers that you might not recognise.

Another option might be to use Disk Utility > Verify Disk; or perhaps Erase > Erase Free Space. I've seldom used that last option because I've found that if the HD is approaching full, the process of erasing free space needs at least 10% of disk capacity free to do its work. A Catch 22 situation.
 
The OmniGroup (www.omnigroup.com) has a shareware program called OmniDiskSweeper that will find even hidden files and sort them from largest in size to smallest. The trial won't let you delete the files from within the app, but it'll at least locate them for you.
 
I used the omni clean sweeper application and regained the 185GB of space on my new hard drive. Thanks everyone for replying.
 
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