Disappearing Hard Drive Space

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Level 1

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Disappearing Hard Drive Space

Hi,

I am running a Mac Book with OSX 10.5.5. I recently had 17.93GB of free hard drive space. I then copied 6.95GB of data files (PDFs and such) onto my hard drive. After copying this data, I expected I would have 10.98GB of free space. Instead, I had only 810MB of free space, which made no sense to me. I rebooted my computer and now have 2.66GB of free space (which seems odd that I would "gain" hard drive space by rebooting). I have copied nothing else onto my computer in this time frame and cannot come up with any explanation for how 8GB of hard drive space disappeared.

Does anyone have an explanation for this disappearing hard drive space and what I might do to get it back?

Thanks!

Mac Book, Mac OS X (10.5.5)

Posted on Oct 31, 2008 5:05 PM

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Answer 1

baltwo

Level 9

62,386 points

Oct 31, 2008 5:16 PM in response to SMS123

Launch the Terminal.app in /Applications/Utilities/, copy & paste in the following command, hit the return key, copy the results, and post them here:

*ls -al /Volumes/*

Additionally, post the names of all mounted volumes.

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Answer 2

macjack

Level 10

111,242 points

Oct 31, 2008 5:25 PM in response to SMS123

Welcome to Apple Discussions.

Did you do an archive & install, recently. There would be a folder at the root level named " Previous System" that could account for it.

Or Try Omni Disksweeper or WhatSize to find out what's hogging the space.

The restart can free space. Actually, not the restart itself but the refresh of Finder. Sometimes, the Finder does not accurately reflect the change until relaunched.

-mj

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Answer 3

Mad Maxx

Level 1

90 points

Oct 31, 2008 5:42 PM in response to SMS123

When you have 2.33 gb of memory after rebooting your hard drive, its because the Mac os X is dumping all the cache in a hidden folder. There are large cache files for rosetta and other things.
Thats why If you have 500 mb left on a hd, it may hit 0 in no time

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Answer 4

baltwo

Level 9

62,386 points

Oct 31, 2008 5:46 PM in response to Mad Maxx

Please reread the OP's post. He should have 10+ GB left after restarting.

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Answer 5

SMS123 Author

Level 1

0 points

Oct 31, 2008 9:34 PM in response to baltwo

Thanks for all the feedback so far. As suggested, I typed "ls -al /Volumes/" into the Terminal prompt and received the following:

total 8
drwxrwxrwt@ 3 root admin 102 Oct 31 17:18 .
drwxrwxr-t 35 root admin 1258 Sep 16 00:32 ..
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 Oct 31 12:22 Macintosh HD -> /

As for mounted drives, all I have mounted is the Macintosh HD.

Does this help you see what's happening now? Thanks for helping out!

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Answer 6

baltwo

Level 9

62,386 points

Oct 31, 2008 11:24 PM in response to SMS123

That indicates that there aren't any phantom volumes which might explain the size discrepancy. Now, follow macjack's advice and use those apps to see what's taking up space.

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