drive space missing

climber

First I will admit that I am very new to OSX..I am running 10.2.4 and notice that there is roughtly 200 megs missing from each partition...I have 3..it just works for me in regards to organization. I have done my OSX reading but can't see anything that might give an indication as to why..are there allot of invisible file with OSX that are needed. What am I missing?



thanks

der kopf

There are VERY MUCH invisible files. An easy way to find this out is by comparing what the finder shows you against what ls -al in the terminal will show you. Look, at the root of my harddrive, the finder shows me:

Code:

System

sw

Applications

Library

Developer

Users







Whereas the terminal shows me (taking just -a as option):

Code:

. Desktop DB Trash mach.sym

.. Desktop DF Users mach_kernel

.DS_Store Desktop Folder Volumes private

.Trashes Developer automount sbin

.VolumeIcon.icns Library bin sw

.hidden Network cores tmp

.mdt-stamp Shutdown Check dev usr

.vol System etc var

Applications TheVolumeSettingsFolder mach

junkyard dawg

You can use a utility like Cocktail to set the Finder to show invisible files, then compare file/folder sizes in the finder. My guess is that it's virtual memory swap files that are eating up the space on your HD, but these would only be found on partitions used as startup disks. If a partition isn't a startup disk then it's not swap files eating up the space.



How large is each partition?





http://www2.dicom.se/cocktail/index.html

climber

lets see 41 gig drive that only has 37.5 gigs available



LOL very interesting

I have 3 partitionsby the way

a 5+ gig

16+ gig

and a 15+ gig





I tried out cocktail..nothing out of the ordinary in regards to hidden files..small 4-8k files



me lost



its not s big concern just a curiosity



thanks

agent302

Quote:

Originally posted by climber

lets see 41 gig drive that only has 37.5 gigs available

This is probably just an issue of how hard drive manufacturer's label their drives versus how the OS looks at them. The hard drive manufacturer will tell you the you have a 40 gigabyte hard drive. That's technically correct, because it has 40,000,000,000 bytes. However, the OS works in binary, and a kilobyte is actually not 1,000 bytes, but actually 1,024. So, instead of 1 GB being 10^9 bytes (which is the technically correct SI usage of the prefix giga), 1 GB is actually 2^30 bytes. And, if you work it out 37.5 x 2^30 is the same is 40 x 10^9.

climber

However, the OS works in binary, and a kilobyte is actually not 1,000 bytes, but actually 1,024. So, instead of 1 GB being 10^9 bytes (which is the technically correct SI usage of the prefix giga), 1 GB is actually 2^30 bytes.



Makes sense now...thanks for the explanation.