Where did the hard drive space go?

allinoneallinone
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I have friend with a G5 PowerMac with a 240 GB hard drive for whom I am trying to provide some tech support.



The drive got totally full.



I deleted 4 GB of files off of it so it is usable again but I can't figure out what is taking up all the space on the drive.



I have used WhatSize on the drive and if you add up the size of all the folders at the root it doesn't come close to adding up to what the drive reports.



I have run fsck in single user. I have run DiskWarrior (3.03) and rebuilt the file structure. I have updated the OS from 10.3.9 to 10.4.8



Still the hidden space-sucker has not revealed itself.



Any ideas?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Haven't used WhatSize - does it report hidden files too, or just Finder-visible ones?



    OmniDiskSweeper does invisible ones too... chances are some application's log files went out of control. Many logs are kept in the Unixy layers not visible to the Finder.
  • Reply 2 of 5
    allinoneallinone Posts: 279member
    WhatSize does report on invisible files.
  • Reply 3 of 5
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Ya got me then.
  • Reply 4 of 5
    adamradamr Posts: 72member
    OmniDiskSweeper doesn't seem to show sizes for files in another user's folder. I suspect the other program is the same. Is there another user who may have a large iTunes library or something, or ripped DVDs etc? If so, you need to run the size checker while logged in as the other user.



    On my machine, the amount Omni DS shows as free is less than the total minus the amount used. The difference is made up by about 2GB in my wife's iPhoto library.
  • Reply 5 of 5
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,323moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by adamr


    OmniDiskSweeper doesn't seem to show sizes for files in another user's folder. I suspect the other program is the same. Is there another user who may have a large iTunes library or something, or ripped DVDs etc? If so, you need to run the size checker while logged in as the other user.



    On my machine, the amount Omni DS shows as free is less than the total minus the amount used. The difference is made up by about 2GB in my wife's iPhoto library.



    Yes that's right, it doesn't have permission to search other user's folders. The Finder doesn't either. My guess is your wife has a massive store of pornography. If she doesn't, put some in there and then confront her about it and see what she does.



    I think there are also certain folders that Whatsize etc doesn't search. One of the most notable ones is /Volumes. This is where external drives are mounted. If you perhaps save stuff to an external drive or disk image, some programs create a folder in /Volumes and save stuff there.
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