Finder and Disk Utility showing inconsistent free space

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Finder and Disk Utility showing inconsistent free space

Hi everyone,

Recently I've upgrade from SL to Lion on my MacBook Pro and I noticed that finder and Disk Utility are showing different amount of free space in my hard drive. Finder says that there's 129.16 GB free when I click on Get Info over my Macintosh HD, and Disk Utility shows 77.05 GB free. I've tried repairing disk permissions, repairing the disk and nothing changes.

I don't know if it has anything to do with the problem, but anyway, I had a BootCamp partition, but I erased it via Disk Utility and resized the Macintosh HD partition to fill the entire hard drive. The bootcamp partition was a NTFS partition, but I've formated it to HFS+ again, so it shouldn't affect anything.

I have no idea of what to do next. Any help here would be great!

Thanks in advance,

Caio

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Aug 3, 2011 9:00 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

johnl927

Level 3

594 points

Aug 3, 2011 9:11 AM in response to Caio92

Your not supposed to delete the bootcamp parition with disk utility, it wont recover the free space from the windows partition, your supposed to use bootcamp utility and merge the free space back into your Macintosh HD partition. If I were you I would navigate to the applications>utilties>bootcamp and launch the app and then make a temp parition, once that is done launch bootcamp utility again and merge the free space.

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Answer 2

Caio92 Author

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Aug 3, 2011 11:35 AM in response to johnl927

I just tried what you said and nothing changed, the difference still the same 😟

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Answer 3

Caio92 Author

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Aug 5, 2011 6:56 AM in response to johnl927

I accidentally solved the problem. As I said, I used to have a Bootcamp partition, which wasn't removed using the Bootcamp Utility. I used the Disk Utility instead, and, I believe because of that, the space where the NTFS partition used to be wasn't recognized by Finder, that showed a different amount of space then it should be (around the same size of the old partition).

Well, yesterday I downloaded some very large files (around 40 and 20 GB), and suddenly Finder showed me that I had more free space then I had before downloading the files. So, the "lost" space was found, because somehow, those large files filled the space where the Bootcamp partition used to be, making it "visible" again.

So, if you have this kind of problem, just download or move to your hard drive some very large files, to almost fill it. At least it worked for me.

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Answer 4

Yatos

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Aug 13, 2011 8:44 PM in response to Caio92

I have a similar problem. I just upgraded to lion and i have been cleaning up my hard drive. I deleted almost 100gb of data and when i check dick utility it says I only have 38gb of free space. When i get info on Macintosh HD it says I have 108gb free.Which one is Correct?????

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Answer 5

Aug 13, 2011 9:15 PM in response to Caio92

I have the same issue. However, I have never used Bootcamp, nor created any extraneous partitions.

I gues that shoots the "partition theory" out the window.

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Answer 6

Caio92 Author

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Aug 14, 2011 9:50 AM in response to Yatos

I don't know wich one is corret, however, if you really cleaned around 100 GB of data, the 38gb that Disk Utility shows shouldn't be correct. And one more thing, recently I've installed an app that showed, during the installation process the amout of free space available, and it was the same amout that shows up when you click over your hard drive icon and press space. So for installation purposes, that's the free space you have.

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Answer 7

Caio92 Author

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Aug 17, 2011 6:27 PM in response to Caio92

Well, I think that what I did wasn't good enough to fix completely the problem. When I deleted the very large files from my hard drive, the amount of space I thought I've recovered vanished again. So, I tried the partition method suggest by johnl927, but in a more aggressive approach. Instead of creating a default 20 GB partition with bootcamp utility, I created the largest one I could do, restarted the computer and then erased. I did it for three or four times, and each time a little bit of space was recovered. Finally, the two information given by finder and disk utility matched! This time I think it's for real, so that's what I'd recomend!

Cheers,

Caio.

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Answer 8

Aug 24, 2011 2:45 PM in response to Caio92

I have this issue also.

Finder says I have 108.35gb available, System Information and Disk Utility both say I only have 64.24gb available.

I have verified and repaired disk permissions.

I have never had Bootcamp installed.

I recently had about 60mb of films in iTunes which I copied to an external drive, and removed them from iTunes - then emptied the Trash. It seems half of my system still thinks they're there?

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Answer 9

Aug 29, 2011 6:21 PM in response to richardblyth83

I have successfully reconciled the difference between the reports in DU and Finder. 🙂

I momentarily disabled Time Machine, and the .mobilebackups folder was then cleared of Local Snapshots, a function of Time Machine which saves incremental changes between actual Time Machine backups.

Apparently Finder sees the accumulated data as "free space", because it will be overwritten if need be. However, Disk Utility sees the usage and subtracts it from its calculations of free space.

Once you turn Time Machine back on, Local Snapshots will resume, and your free space will diminish until you hook up a Time Machine drive and perform a backup, or turn off Time Machine to clear the "cache".

There is also a Terminal Command for disabling Local Snapshots, but I think it beyond the scope of this thread.

BTW, This is only an issue on MacBooks, as Desktop Macs don't use Local Snapshots.

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Answer 10

Aug 30, 2011 4:28 AM in response to SP Forsythe

Likewise - over the weekend I noticed that after I'd sync'd Time Machine, shut down the MBP and restarted - the Finder and System Profiler/Disk Utility all show the same amount of available space.

I also noticed that in System Profiler the Backups portion of space taken had dramatically reduced - by about 40gb in fact - the exact amount of space I felt I was 'missing'.

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Answer 11

Liz M

Level 1

26 points

Sep 19, 2011 8:37 PM in response to SP Forsythe

My husband had the same problem just now; he was clearing out his disk to make space for something but the space wasn't really gone. He went ahead and did the command to turn this feature off completely:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

See How to diable MobileBackups feature for a little more information. This allowed him to proceed with what he was trying to do.

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Answer 12

Nov 6, 2011 8:14 PM in response to Caio92

All I did was "Erase Free Space" in Disk Utility and then a reboot and problem solved. It took a while since I had quite a bit of free space but worth seeing an agreement between Finder and Disk Utility in the amount of space available. Works the same as downloading a very large file but more effective in that it deletes it more thoroughly thus seeing more of that free space.

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Answer 13

Nov 9, 2011 1:58 PM in response to Liz M

Best answer, this was really becoming a nuisance for me as I've removed my SuperDrive in my MacBook Pro and replaced it with another HDD which I use as storage and an internal Time Capsule. This is definitely a Time Machine issue where the disk space appears differently.

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Answer 14

Caio92 Author

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Nov 9, 2011 2:21 PM in response to lisdavid89

Before reading your post lisdavid89, I did the same thing, not only once but three times.

At first, I did the 7-pass method, and it recovered around 30GB of free space that Finder wasn't showing. Then I did the 3-pass method twice a few days later and it recovered the remaining 20GB, and it seems that this time I really solved the problem.

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Answer 15

Jan 18, 2012 6:44 PM in response to SP Forsythe

Thank you SP! I had the same problem and your Time Machine fix was the only cure! Thanks!!

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