Two questions in one regarding external HDD

S

StuMac

Registered
Right guys, probably about 10 years ago I was a big techie with DOS and all that, and now I seem to have forgotten how to do anything!! So please bare with me.

Two questions if anyone can help.

i) My iMac, which I bought last year has run out of HDD space. What can I do to extend it? I really can't work out what I have filled it up with as I have only

8.5gb in my applications folder
4.7gb in the systems folder
9.1 GB in the libary
40.18GB in the users bit (of which 32gb is music on iTunes)

Other than the standard applications I have a DOS emulator, Office and Spore.

But apparently I have used 200gb?!?!? I can't find where this disk space is being used up. Any ideas on what I can check to clear this out? I put a partition in to possibly install windows, how do I check that's been removed correctly?

Also if I plug in a USB drive to extend the memory how can I get the mac running as if this was actually the normal drive for this computer?

And question ii)

I have a PS3 which I want to back up my info on, but its on a FAT32 format. Can I format a USB HDD in FAT32 using my Mac?

Any help guys will be appreciated!
 
i) Have you emptied the Trash? (Like in Windows, removing file in Finder only moves it to trash, you have to empty it to free the disk)
If you mount a USB disk, it is disk, so it behaves like disk. But, you might like to format it using HFS+ filesystem (the OS X default one) to be able to use bigger files etc.
ii) Use Disk Utility to format the disk, either as fat32 or HFS+.
 
i) Nope trash is empty.

ii) Nice one, puts my worry to bed about not having my PS3 work with a external HDD
 
Go to disk utility in your utilities folder (Mac HD>Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility). This will show you if you have any partitions that are there, but fail to mount.
 
Cheers, just checked that, only one partition for 232gb. No other ones on there... whats chewing up all my HDD!!

Any ideas?
 
Go to Terminal which is also in the utilities folder.
Type this in the terminal -
Code: 
defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
then type
Code: 
killall finder

This will show you all the hidden files.
Go into your main hard drive, then go to the View drop down menu at the top of the screen, then go to Show View Options and make sure the Calculate All Sizes box is checked, wait for the sizes to load and then it will tell you in the main hard drive window what is taking up all of the space.

Once you have seen what is taking up all the space, tell us here then to get back to normal type in -

Code: 
defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
then type
Code: 
killall finder
 
Thanks. however after typing that I get

Code: 
No matching processes belonging to you were found

And nothing extra appears in the HD finder menu?
 
Thanks guys, thank you very much! Found my mac was making .log files. Looks like the computer has been making them ever since I got the mac about two years ago. They started off about 800kb, but as time went past they kept getting bigger and bigger until they were eventually 64mb.

Now I had 5000 of these files!!!! Deleted all the ones it would let except where it said they were in use and bang!!! 164gb back on my HDD.

Top job :D

Files were under private/var/log/asl found them using Disk Inventory X.
 
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