Disappearing Hard Drive Space

reccerecce
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
In an attempt to keep my mac nice and happy, I ran a scan with Norton Antivirus 2003. It took a while, and when it was done, I realized that all my available hard drive space had disappeared, 23gb worth. I searched and searched through my files and its just gone. I ran disk utility and everything else I could find, a few corrupted files, but the problem still persists. Now, I'm booted to a Diskwarrior 3 CD and in the process of rebuilding my directory. Diskwarrior tells me 35% of my directory was out of order. But its been running for over 9 hours.

Will Diskwarrior even fix my problem? Is it something completely different? And if Diskwarrior can fix it, is it supposed to take this long, or has it frozen? How do I tell? Someone please help, cause I'm starting to panic...just a little.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    jwri004jwri004 Posts: 626member
    Diskwarrior, by most accounts, always takes a long time to work. Important thing is to let it FINISH. I have heard of cases where it has taken a couple of days.



    Did you attempt a restart before you went to diskwarrior. OSX like to store hidden files which can get quite large, Typically a restart will clean out the data and give you back the space. Another option is to use OmniDiskSweeper to see where the space has gone.



    Most people would also agree that Norton is arse.



    Hope all goes well
  • Reply 2 of 7
    cakecake Posts: 1,010member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by jwri004

    Diskwarrior, by most accounts, always takes a long time to work. Important thing is to let it FINISH. I have heard of cases where it has taken a couple of days.



    Really?

    The only time I've seen DW take a long time is when it was working on a big hard drive - in my case it was a 160GB drive and it took 15 minutes.

    9 hours doesn't sound right.

    Nothing in Alsoft's Support forum either.



    recce, try using OmniDiskSweeper to see exactly what's taking up space on your hard drive.
  • Reply 3 of 7
    reccerecce Posts: 6member
    I've been looking around for a while and I've found stories of it taking 14 hours, etc. so I'm a bit more confident that its jsut going slow, as opposed to frozen. Keep in mind, 35% of it was out of place. Mine is a 60gb, though, so approaching 12 hours now is getting a bit long. However, now I'm wondering if Diskwarrior will even solve my problem. Could something else be causing Hard Drive Space to disappear? And why after I ran norton antivirus? Nothing is quarantined. I don't get it.
  • Reply 4 of 7
    zarathustrazarathustra Posts: 264member
    I had a similar problem recently and found that I had a huge file (4-5 GB) in my console log...



    See if you have the same ( On the disc where you have your OS installed look in...\\library\\logs\\console ) I deleted mine with no problems and regained the space. It builds up from time to time and I just get rid of it again.



    Good Luck.
  • Reply 5 of 7
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Probably because Norton products tend to break MacOS X.



    Their disk tools are worthless, and now it seems that their anti-virus is designed to do more damage than the viruses themselves.



    Nice.





    Bottom line: Stay away from Norton anything.
  • Reply 6 of 7
    agent macintoshagent macintosh Posts: 187member
    I used a norton product. it completely deleted my whole hard drive. that was a while ago. i am back to normal now. i will NEVER buy a norton product again.





  • Reply 7 of 7
    reccerecce Posts: 6member
    Finally solved the mystery. Turns out Norton Antivirus 9.0 for mac has a glitch where it tends to leave a huge file behind after a scan if everything doesn't go exactly right. I finally came across an obscure reference to it on the symantec website. I had to log on as a root user and run a search for a file called 'spacesuckingfile.xxxxxx'. And yes, that is the real file name. After deleting that, all my hard drive space was restored.

    Thanks to everyone who responded. I appreciate it.
Sign In or Register to comment.