how can I tell what is taking up space on my HD

Hi there. It makes it much easier for people who are diagnosing your issue if you leave some info about you set up in your 'My settings' window on the right side of the support window, (if you look to the right while browsing the forums you should see the link).
Are you running Time Machine? Have you emptied the trash. Do you have a lot of DMG files saved, (unless sparse these can be mainly empty space)?
have you tried the basic trouble shooting steps, (RP)?
Where did you get the 8.5GB figure from exactly?

Basically, the DMGs if any are just a shot in the dark. I store stuff on my Mac as .dmg files, it's just a disk image. But unless you use the sparse method you 'might' end up creating a DVD image with only a few files on. So you have 4.38GB which is as far as the finder is concerned is accounted for even if it's unused.

We need to see where the space is being taken up. Open finder window and have it so your home folder and its contents are open. You can do a get info on each, (select and press command-I) or use the inspector which I find better when browsing. Select say your desktop, then press and hold Command and Option?Alt and then press I.
At the moment my home folder is;
Desktop 6.4Mb
Docs 376 KB
Downloads 58.6MB
Library 139 MB
Movies 160KB
Music 3.8MB
Pictures 306.9MB
Public 0KB
Sites 40KB.

Now my music and important data are on a separate internal drive so that if I have to take the Mac in for repairs or do a complete erase and reinstall of the OS then the data is untouched.

Also, shutdown and restart. then once started up open Activity Monitor and see if anything has eaten drive space that you use or whether its hidden activity.

Anything not look right to you on yours?

Message was edited by: gumsie

null

See: http://pinkmutant.com/articles/TigerMisc.html

It still applies to Leopard, even though the title has Tiger in it.

Good luck!

I have found "OmniDiskSweeper" to be useful in this situation.

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/

charlie

A small utility called "What Size" (obviously) will give you information about what is on your disk and it highlights the larger areas allowing you to focus on where the problem areas might be. And I see they have just added a pie-chart view.

Is there an application out there that can tell me what is taking up space and what I can saftley delete?

Yes and No. "Disk Inventory X" is a free application that will tell you exactly where your disk space has gone. It fully reveals all details of the file system and sorts it by size, and does pretty graphics too.

However, it won't tell you if something is safe to delete.

If you want to see what folders contain items taking the most disk space, open your main drive window, select List view (Command-2), select Show View Options from the View menu (or Command-J), and click on the box next to Calculate all sizes.

You can then sort by size to see which folders are taking up the most disk space. After opening that folder you can click on the box next to Calculate all sizes to see which of those is using the most space, and so on.

When you are finished finding the folder/file sizes and trashing what you no longer want, you should uncheck the Calculate all sizes for each window because it takes processing power to do those calculations and can slow your computer speed.