what is taking up hard drive space?

On the space issue, has everybody emptied trash? You each have your own and if somebody doesn't... There's varous utilities for scanning drives for space usage. Some are free, others not. I think Omnidisksweeper is free. Search the Discussions for this subject and the others will probably be mentioned.

A few GB are kind of hidden and not accounted for, I think. Some cache files, etc.

160? I mean only 160? That's peanuts by modern standards. 🙂

Slow computer. Might start by verifying hard drive with Disk Utility. Installing and using Applejack would be good too. Are you sure everybody is logged out and didn't leave a ton of applications running in their account?

I'm too lazy to remove the old formatting from my boilerplate post on this:

*Quick checks*

Have you emptied the Trash?

*Reading on hard drive space issues*

[Erasing free space results in erroneous full disk warning|http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=459623&seqNum=9]

[Where did my disk space go?|http://www.macfixitforums.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=Forum38&Number=770243]

[X-Lab: Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk|http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/freeingspace.html]

[Amazing Disappearing Drive Space|http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/TigerMisc.html]

[Increase HD Free Space|http://macosx.com/forums/howto-faqs/275191-how-easily-increase-hd free-space-laptop.html]

[How to free up my disk space|http://www.macmaps.com/diskfull.html]

[Baby Boomer's Apple Discussions post|http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10189607#10189607]

*Utilities for investigating drive space usage*

[Disk Inventory (free)|http://www.derlien.com/]

[OmniDiskSweeper (free)|http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/download/]

[WhatSize|http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize/] (now shareware and only useful on <20GB drives until you buy it)

[GrandPerspective|http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/]

As Limnos says, there are files you don't see. A few examples are the OS swap files, Photoshop's scratch disk, the cache files that every web browser known to man creates, etc.

How much RAM do you have installed?

2.5 GHz Power Mac (PPC) G5-Quad; 16GB RAM; mutant, flashed 550MHz nVidia GeForce 7800GTX, 1,700MHz 512MB VRAM; ATTO ExpressPCI UL5D LP SCSI card; Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 and Leopard 10.5.8 boot drives; Spotblight, Dashboard and Time Machine permanently disabled; dual 22" CRT monitors; USB wireless 'n' available but connected to the Internet via wired Ethernet; FW flatbed scanner; 2 SCSI scanners (one tabloid-size transparency scanner and a film scanner); various internal & external HDs; FW Epson 2200 and Ethernet Samsung ML-2850ND printers; 2 X Back-UPS RS 1500 XS units.

Alex, besides OmniDiskSweeper, I think you should get Applejack...

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15667/applejack

After installing, reboot holding down CMD+s, (+s), then when the DOS like prompt shows, type in...

applejack AUTO

Then let it do all 6 of it's things.

At least it'll eliminate some questions if it doesn't fix it.

The 6 things it does are...

Correct any Disk problems.

Repair Permissions.

Clear out Cache Files.

Repair/check several plist files.

Dump the VM files for a fresh start.

Trash old Log files.

First reboot will be slower, sometimes 2 or 3 restarts will be required for full benefit... my guess is files relying upon other files relying upon other files! :-)

Disconnect the USB cable from any Uninterruptible Power Supply so the system doesn't shut down in the middle of the process.

BDAqua wrote:

Alex, besides OmniDiskSweeper, I think you should get Applejack...

Limnos wrote:

Might start by verifying hard drive with Disk Utility. Installing and using Applejack would be good too

😉

Yes, you can Verify it using DU, you just cant Repair it from the drive you're booted from, it'll be greyed out... AJ CAN repair it if needed. 🙂

I must be blinder than I thought! 😟

Almost certainly it's virtual memory. Or swap files. If you have 6gigs in the computer and it's beach balling, and the drive checks out, my guess is bad ram. First restart the computer holding down the shift key, then immediately see if your drive space comes back. While it's still in safe boot mode, verify that all the ram is reporting properly.

If it's not bad ram and your drive is still missing space, download a demo version of whatsize. It'll show you precisely where all your space is getting eaten. The demo has a 30 day limit as opposed to a size limit so it's really ideal.

HTH

-Graham

You can also try starting the computer while holding down the shift key (takes longer to start so be patient). This puts it into Safe Mode which does some spring cleaning and a directory check. It also disables seome features so you don't want ot run it in SM all the time. While in SM do you Disk Utility verify. I found that sometimes running DU from the same drive as you're analyzing while in normal mode results in spurious error reports.

If it won't boot in safe mode, that tells me it's bad ram. It all adds up. Take out two of the modules and retry. Make sure you take out the matched pair.

Fans are probably racing because SM disables some things and maybe one of them might be the software control of the cooling of the computer, in which case the fans go on full as an overheating prevention safety measure. Still, it should start up in SM. Failure to start in SM usually means it is having problems running all the checking routines, especially drive issues (which is puzzling because you say that disk verifies okay).

[What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode? (Mac OS X)|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1564]

[Safe Boot takes longer than normal startup|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107394]

[Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5- Computer shuts down during Safe Boot|http://support.apple.com/kb/TA24054]