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Primary Partition showing 37GB free when I only have 200 gigs of a 550gb drive in use

#1
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3/14/09 at 9:03pm
  • Joined: October 1997
  • Location: Navesink, NJ
  • Post Count: 5,466
So I booted my machine tonight after not having used it for a week and it told me my 500gb drive was completely full. Impossible, I thought, but so it seemed. So I cleaned out the videos from my new camcorder and still only have 37 GB free. I looked at all the sizes of the directories on that drive and there should only be 200 or less used. I know OSX has a pretty good cache/swap size but it shouldnt be nearly 400GB should it? =)

I see there is a shareware app recommended by apple called Leopard Cache Cleaner, but I don't think this is something that should really be needed with the way I use this box. The more likely culprit to me seems to be iMovie hiding some scratch space somewhere for iMovie 9, any idea where I might find those hidden somewhere? Or what else I should look into?

"Sam, you are the biggest nutter we have here."
Blog: Navesink.net - My Flickr Stream is here - Click here to Email me - Updates at Twitter & FriendFeed - Join the HTF Flickr Pool

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#2
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3/14/09 at 9:38pm
  • Joined: October 1997
  • Location: Navesink, NJ
  • Post Count: 5,466

Re: Primary Partition showing 37GB free when I only have 200 gigs of a 550gb drive in use

Figured it out using Disk Inventory X.

I have Carbon copy Cloner set to automatically run at 3AM to backup a bunch of stuff to an external drive. Apparently several times when I tried to run it couldnt access that drive, so it just wrote to the /volumes directory which is usually hidden.

Same thing happened to this guy:
Where has all of my hard drive space gone? (Intel Mac, OSX 10.5.1) | Ask Metafilter

I'm gonna run the Sudo -rm command and try not to wipe out my system, wish me luck! If I don't post in a few minutes its cause I've hung myself....

"Sam, you are the biggest nutter we have here."
Blog: Navesink.net - My Flickr Stream is here - Click here to Email me - Updates at Twitter & FriendFeed - Join the HTF Flickr Pool

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#3
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3/14/09 at 9:50pm
  • Joined: October 1997
  • Location: Navesink, NJ
  • Post Count: 5,466

Re: Primary Partition showing 37GB free when I only have 200 gigs of a 550gb drive in use

Success. Now to figure out how to stop CCC from doing that again next time it can't find the external drive....

"Sam, you are the biggest nutter we have here."
Blog: Navesink.net - My Flickr Stream is here - Click here to Email me - Updates at Twitter & FriendFeed - Join the HTF Flickr Pool

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#4
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3/14/09 at 9:54pm
  • Joined: July 2001
  • Post Count: 1,409

Re: Primary Partition showing 37GB free when I only have 200 gigs of a 550gb drive in use

Ah, I was just going to post to try and help you Sam. My first suggestion was to run the maintenance tasks using the Terminal, but you've already figured that out so I guess I'll just wish you luck.

We had a problem with out of control log files. Forcing the maintenance tasks to run help some. It just didn't free up all the space that it should. The hidden log files in /private/var/logs were gigantic. Some type of repetitive network errors caused the asl.log file to balloon. I had trouble troubleshooting the errors since the file was too big to look at in the Console. It just kept crashing it. I ended up doing a clean install. It was long overdue anyway. Hope yours doesn't come to that.
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