13 GB down to only 183 MB after Erase Free Space, why?

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13 GB down to only 183 MB after Erase Free Space, why?

I just securely erase free spaces on my hard drive, I had 13 GB available spaces before I erase free spaces, after that I only had 183 MB available, and now I am experiencing the slowness of my Macbook Pro both with boots up and shut down, can anyone help, and how to solve this?
Thank you.

macbook pro, Mac OS X (10.6.6)

Posted on Mar 14, 2011 7:22 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

362,023 points

Mar 14, 2011 7:40 PM in response to moo chen

Does this help: OS X v10.5 or later- About Disk Utility's erase free space feature?

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Answer 2

moo chen Author

Level 1

12 points

Mar 14, 2011 7:46 PM in response to Kappy

no, I did follow what it says on the page, but it doesn't say anything about the slowness and taking so much spaces on my hard drive afterward though.

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Answer 3

Kappy

Level 10

362,023 points

Mar 14, 2011 7:52 PM in response to moo chen

I think you need to read to the end of the article:

*Additional Information*

If you are erasing the free space of your Mac OS X startup volume, you may see this message:

"*Your startup disk is almost full*.

You need to make more space available on your startup disk by deleting files."

This is a normal, temporary part of the erase free space process. Once the free space has been erased, the disk space is available again.

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Answer 4

moo chen Author

Level 1

12 points

Mar 14, 2011 7:56 PM in response to Kappy

I didn't miss out the end of the article, it does not mention you will lose your hard drive spaces after you done with erase free spaces, nor the slowness or your Macbook.
I let it ran through for the whole process, but it ended up giving me a negative result. any ideas?

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Answer 5

Kappy

Level 10

362,023 points

Mar 14, 2011 8:04 PM in response to moo chen

Try restarting the computer. If that doesn't resolve the space problem then you had a corrupted drive before erasing free space. Note that except for security purposes there is no reason to ever erase free space. It's time consuming, potentially risky, and unnecessary.

As for your computer running slowly that would not have anything directly to do with erasing free space, but it could be aggravated by having only 180 MBs of free space if you don't have more than 2 GBs of RAM and are trying to run a lot of stuff concurrently.

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