Space not being made after deleting files

dave17lax

dave17lax

Inventor of the Egg Wave
I only just recently was able to find time to install Tiger, and in doing so get some long overdue maintainance done on my mac. After deleting a bunch of old apps and files, plus a user that wasn't being used anymore, I did an Update- install of Tiger. This pretty much capped my harddrive, but for various reasons I did not want to do a clean install and was ready to go in and delete lots more stuff.

OK now here's the problem, I had about 700mb left on my hard drive, and began the process of deleting files. Funny thing: After running a few programs to make sure they work under Tiger, I noticed that I'm down to Zero KB available...Sure swap files, right? Well I have continued deleting files, about 500mb more, but everytime I empty the trash it continues to say Zero KB available.

Is the upgrade from Panther to Tiger really this bad? I was able to run fine with my hard drive almost full in Panther..now all of a sudden the OS is using only 500 of my 832 mb of RAM, but is feasting on my delicious HD space!!
 
dave17lax said:
I only just recently was able to find time to install Tiger, and in doing so get some long overdue maintainance done on my mac. After deleting a bunch of old apps and files, plus a user that wasn't being used anymore, I did an Update- install of Tiger. This pretty much capped my harddrive, but for various reasons I did not want to do a clean install and was ready to go in and delete lots more stuff.

OK now here's the problem, I had about 700mb left on my hard drive, and began the process of deleting files. Funny thing: After running a few programs to make sure they work under Tiger, I noticed that I'm down to Zero KB available...Sure swap files, right? Well I have continued deleting files, about 500mb more, but everytime I empty the trash it continues to say Zero KB available.

Is the upgrade from Panther to Tiger really this bad? I was able to run fine with my hard drive almost full in Panther..now all of a sudden the OS is using only 500 of my 832 mb of RAM, but is feasting on my delicious HD space!!
Click to expand...
Your "problem" is the normal and expected behavior of MacOS X. Don't delete the files that you use. Run OnyX to delete your old cache and what not files. You will free up a substantial amount of HD space.
 
It's a bad idea to operate with your hard drive almost full. Acc. to Micromat, you risk data loss. They recommend 10% free. Plus, your machine needs space for its swap files.

Doug
 
There are some programs that are incompatible with Tiger which would fill up log files in /var/log until the disk space was completely consumed. This might be the problem you're having, but someone else will have to tell you the programs because I can't recall which ones were doing it.

Tiger uses a lot more virtual memory than Panther did. This might be your problem. I see that most of it has to do with the Dashboard Widgets that take up about 200MB of VM each.
 
Mate of mine had (sounds like) a similar problem... he emptied the trash and the available HD space went DOWN not up as expected.
Booting in Single user mode (Command+S at startup chime) and running the fsck command (syntax is provided on boot up) - solved the problem.
I'll add that on another machine, where NO disk space was available, I noted that the cron scripts weren't running for some reason - forcing them to run under sudo solved that one.
HTH
 
- Yes, have restarted, though after a few hours it slowly took HD space back to zero. (Virtual memory usage increased even though the computer just sat there over night).

- I will try OnyX and see if it fits my needs, though I am referring to a bunch of old files and apps that I don't use anymore, not actual system files.

- I don't use filevault

- Does 10% free space include swap files? I do need a bigger hard drive, but 2-3 gigs of space for swap files is nuts.

- :) Yes I've emptied the trash. That's what initially got me so upset was dumping hundreds of MBs of stuff and not seeing any change on the available disk space.

- I did already find at least one offending app, which was actually a 3rd party driver. I just uninstalled it for now until they update it. Other than that the system doesn't even have much installed on it. I did notice the widgets taking up so much. I can't believe that something I look at maybe once or twice a day takes up so much memory.

- I will also try fsck'ing.

Thanks everyone for your help.

ddm
 
FYI - my panther server goes up to 5Gb of VM some times... and regularly get over 3Gb on client (dependent on what's running).
Apple and MS recommend a minimum of 20% free disk space on a drive for continuing good service...
Goos luck.
 
I've experienced this behaviour before. You really really need to allow at least 10% breathing room on your disk. That 10% is a minimum. Free up the hard disk and run diskutilities, diskwarrior and everything should come back to normal. Fill up your disk and you'll see funny stuff happening no matter how hard you cross your fingers!!
 
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