olivier50

Q: Lost disk space

Hello,

 

I have a Macbook pro retina mi-2012 (10.1) with 16gb of ram.

 

I'm using mac OS X El Capitan 10.11.3

 

I'm trying to setup a bootcamp partition. The problem is that the finder says that I have 133 gb available but the bootcamp assistant and the disk utility say that I have only 56 Gb available. I've tried to do the Sos procedure in the disk utility in the recovery mode, it says that all is ok and I don't recover my space. The disk utility says that all the lost space is used for "Movies". But I don't have any movies. And the finder says that I have 133 gb left. Even Onyx says that I have only 56 Gb left. What am I missing ?

 

 

Thanks for your help.

Mac OS X (10.7.1), Mac OS X server 10.7.1

Posted on Feb 1, 2016 9:38 AM

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Q: Lost disk space

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  • by Kappy,Helpful

    Kappy Kappy Feb 1, 2016 10:07 AM in response to olivier50
    Level 10 (270,831 points)
    Desktops
    Feb 1, 2016 10:07 AM in response to olivier50

    The problem, I'm guessing, is that Boot Camp needs contiguous space. You drive is a bit fragmented so Boot Camp can only find 56 GBs of contiguous space in your free space. There is only one fix for this - repartitioning the drive. Unfortunately, this will also erase everything on the drive.

     

    Paragon Technologies makes a software utility called CampTuneX that can be used to resize Boot Camp partitions without needing to erase the drive. It costs about $20. You could try creating the 56GB partition Boot Camp allows, then purchase CampTuneX and see if it will expand that for you. The alternative is to backup everything, use Disk Utility to repartition the drive, then restore your backup. This will defragment the drive so the empty space is all contiguous. This doesn't cost anything if you have a drive for the backup, but it will take some time.

  • by olivier50,Solvedanswer

    olivier50 olivier50 Feb 1, 2016 10:05 AM in response to Kappy
    Level 1 (1 points)
    Feb 1, 2016 10:05 AM in response to Kappy

    Thanks for your help. I found where is the problem. It seems that disk utility and many programs rely on spotlight to display disk space. So when the index is not up-to-date or buggy, some programs display wrong data. Rebuilding indexing with excluding the startup partition in the spotlight pane do the trick.

  • by Kappy,Helpful

    Kappy Kappy Feb 1, 2016 10:15 AM in response to olivier50
    Level 10 (270,831 points)
    Desktops
    Feb 1, 2016 10:15 AM in response to olivier50

    Never rely on the storage information in About This Mac. Always use Get Into on the device. Using reindexing will not fix fragmentation. Boot Camp still must fine contiguous space for the partition as I explained earlier. No well-written program would use the storage data as it's reported in About This Mac. That information is most always unreliable.