System Thinks HD is Full

MB Pro 17, 10.6.1, 4 GB RAM...

I installed a 500 GB drive in this machine some months ago. It has
performed flawlessly. It has (or had until last night) about 206 GB of
free space.

In the wee hours of this morning, as I was working on an image in
Photoshop, a pop-up warning told me that the disk was full. I was
running quite a few apps besides Photoshop; for example, I was running
Screen Sharing to control another MB Pro that was collecting image data
in my little astronomical observatory
http://www.primordial-light.com/macastronomer.html>.

I have done the simple things: Ran fsck. Booted from my SuperDuper!
backup FW drive and run Disk Utility's repair and repair permissions.
Erased free space. Rebuilt the directory with Disk Warrior. Checked
files and folders with Disk Warrior.

The drive now shows 4.3 GB available, which means that a bit over 200
GB is missing.

I have a full SuperDuper! backup and a Time Machine backup of my home
directory, plus a backup to a terabyte RAID drive, so I am not much
concerned about losing data, but the time involved in restoring from
SuperDuper is considerable, so if anyone has a fix short of a full
restore I would be grateful to hear of it!

TIA!

Davoud

--
I agree with almost everything that you have said and almost everything that
you will say in your entire life.

usenet *at* davidillig dawt cawm

Davoud <> wrote:
> The drive now shows 4.3 GB available, which means that a bit over 200
> GB is missing.

Download GrandPerspective. It will show you graphically what is using
up the space on your drive.

--
K.

Lang may your lum reek.

In article <071120091130035772%>, Davoud <>
wrote:

> MB Pro 17, 10.6.1, 4 GB RAM...
>
> I installed a 500 GB drive in this machine some months ago. It has
> performed flawlessly. It has (or had until last night) about 206 GB of
> free space.
>
> In the wee hours of this morning, as I was working on an image in
> Photoshop, a pop-up warning told me that the disk was full. I was
> running quite a few apps besides Photoshop; for example, I was running
> Screen Sharing to control another MB Pro that was collecting image data
> in my little astronomical observatory
> http://www.primordial-light.com/macastronomer.html>.
>
> I have done the simple things: Ran fsck. Booted from my SuperDuper!
> backup FW drive and run Disk Utility's repair and repair permissions.
> Erased free space. Rebuilt the directory with Disk Warrior. Checked
> files and folders with Disk Warrior.
>
> The drive now shows 4.3 GB available, which means that a bit over 200
> GB is missing.
>
> I have a full SuperDuper! backup and a Time Machine backup of my home
> directory, plus a backup to a terabyte RAID drive, so I am not much
> concerned about losing data, but the time involved in restoring from
> SuperDuper is considerable, so if anyone has a fix short of a full
> restore I would be grateful to hear of it!

If it were my machine, I'd use OnyX (free/donationware) or equivalent to
turn on Show Invisibles. Then I'd display the root directory and sort by
size, descending order. Any folder/directory over 100GB would be
suspect. Open it/them up and see what's so large. My guess is that there
is either a runaway log file or a scratch file which isn't being
properly deleted. The directory, /private/, and its sub-directories,
/private/tmp/ and /private/var/, are likely candidates; but the
culprit(s) could easily be somethng else. (There are terminal commands
to do this, but I don't know what they are.)

Good luck!

Salut Davoud

In article <071120091130035772%>, Davoud <>
wrote:

> MB Pro 17, 10.6.1, 4 GB RAM...
>
> I installed a 500 GB drive in this machine some months ago. It has
> performed flawlessly. It has (or had until last night) about 206 GB of
> free space.

> The drive now shows 4.3 GB available, which means that a bit over 200
> GB is missing.

did you by accident remove your external drive with the SuoerDuper!
backup during a backup action? SuperDuper! will happily continue copying
stuff to your local drive...
Have a look in the hidden folder Volumes for your lost space...

Cheers
Andreas

--
MacAndreas Rutishauser, <http://www.MacAndreas.ch>
EDV-Dienstleistungen, Hard- und Software, Internet und Netzwerk
Beratung, Unterstuetzung und Schulung
<private.php?do=newpm&u=>, Fon: 044 / 721 36 47

Davoud:
> > The drive now shows 4.3 GB available, which means that a bit over 200
> > GB is missing.

Fred Moore:
> If it were my machine, I'd use OnyX (free/donationware) or equivalent to
> turn on Show Invisibles. Then I'd display the root directory and sort by
> size, descending order. Any folder/directory over 100GB would be
> suspect. Open it/them up and see what's so large. My guess is that there
> is either a runaway log file or a scratch file which isn't being
> properly deleted. The directory, /private/, and its sub-directories,
> /private/tmp/ and /private/var/, are likely candidates; but the
> culprit(s) could easily be somethng else. (There are terminal commands
> to do this, but I don't know what they are.)

ls -l -a is one way. Quicker than practically any download! Always
happy to help the helper.

Davoud

--
I agree with almost everything that you have said and almost everything that
you will say in your entire life.

usenet *at* davidillig dawt cawm

In article <071120091130035772%>, Davoud <>
wrote:

> MB Pro 17, 10.6.1, 4 GB RAM...
>
> I installed a 500 GB drive in this machine some months ago. It has
> performed flawlessly. It has (or had until last night) about 206 GB of
> free space.
>
> In the wee hours of this morning, as I was working on an image in
> Photoshop, a pop-up warning told me that the disk was full. I was
> running quite a few apps besides Photoshop; for example, I was running
> Screen Sharing to control another MB Pro that was collecting image data
> in my little astronomical observatory
> http://www.primordial-light.com/macastronomer.html>.
>
> I have done the simple things: Ran fsck. Booted from my SuperDuper!
> backup FW drive and run Disk Utility's repair and repair permissions.
> Erased free space. Rebuilt the directory with Disk Warrior. Checked
> files and folders with Disk Warrior.
>
> The drive now shows 4.3 GB available, which means that a bit over 200
> GB is missing.
>
> I have a full SuperDuper! backup and a Time Machine backup of my home
> directory, plus a backup to a terabyte RAID drive, so I am not much
> concerned about losing data, but the time involved in restoring from
> SuperDuper is considerable, so if anyone has a fix short of a full
> restore I would be grateful to hear of it!
>

I had that happen once when a runaway process was creating files as fast
as it could, although I had no clue about the cause at the time.

I located the problem by running the "Check all Files & Folders" option
of the "Files" pane of DiskWarrior. The scan show there were more files
in a particular directory the allowed; that provided the necessary clue.

--
Tom Stiller

PGP fingerprint = 5108 DDB2 9761 EDE5 E7E3 7BDA 71ED 6496 99C0 C7CF

In article <071120091309372612%>, Davoud <>
wrote:

> Davoud:
> > > The drive now shows 4.3 GB available, which means that a bit over 200
> > > GB is missing.
>
> Fred Moore:
> > If it were my machine, I'd use OnyX (free/donationware) or equivalent to
> > turn on Show Invisibles. Then I'd display the root directory and sort by
> > size, descending order. Any folder/directory over 100GB would be
> > suspect. Open it/them up and see what's so large. My guess is that there
> > is either a runaway log file or a scratch file which isn't being
> > properly deleted. The directory, /private/, and its sub-directories,
> > /private/tmp/ and /private/var/, are likely candidates; but the
> > culprit(s) could easily be somethng else. (There are terminal commands
> > to do this, but I don't know what they are.)
>
> ls -l -a is one way. Quicker than practically any download! Always
> happy to help the helper.
>
> Davoud

du -sh ~/*

will list all the directories on your account. Do the same command on
directories that seem overly large from your initial listing. Its what
I did on Solaris systems. Common thing were application logs
(developers never seem to think of cleaning up after themselves), an
admin doing a backup to a device that doesn't exist thereby creating a
big regular file in /dev/rmt or /dev/dsk.

Most MacOS X systems do a good job of splitting the system/root stuff
from the user stuff. If you have some weird application that runs as
root and doesn't clean up it's log files, you can run

sudo du -sh /*

It will take quite a while to run and show you the system directories.
You may want to stop it when it hits the /Volumes directory if you have
multiple volumes.

% sudo du -sh /*
8.9G /Applications
1.8G /Applications (Mac OS 9)
6.6G /Archive
0B /Cleanup At Startup
4.0K /Desktop (Mac OS 9)
412K /Desktop DB
2.6M /Desktop DF
21M /Desktop Folder
939M /Developer
5.5G /Documents
145M /Internet
6.1G /Library
2.0K /Network
2.0G /System
549M /System Folder
8.0K /TheVolumeSettingsFolder
0B /Trash
8.8G /Users
4.0K /Utilities

--
DeeDee, don't press that button! DeeDee! NO! Dee...
[I filter all Goggle Groups posts, so any reply may be automatically by ignored]

In article fmoore-, Fred
Moore at wrote on 11/7/09 11:58 AM:
...
...

>
> If it were my machine, I'd use OnyX (free/donationware) or equivalent to
> turn on Show Invisibles.

Someone here (damn, I forgot who!) recommended Invisibilty Toggler some time
ago; it's a free one-click app that I really like:
http://tinyurl.com/yhopahm

> Then I'd display the root directory and sort by
> size, descending order. Any folder/directory over 100GB would be
> suspect. Open it/them up and see what's so large. My guess is that there
> is either a runaway log file or a scratch file which isn't being
> properly deleted. The directory, /private/, and its sub-directories,
> /private/tmp/ and /private/var/, are likely candidates; but the
> culprit(s) could easily be somethng else. (There are terminal commands
> to do this, but I don't know what they are.)
>
> Good luck!

--
iMac (24", 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 320 GB HDD) € OS X (10.5.8)

In article C71B6CBE.4B448%nicknaym@[remove_this].gmail.com, Nick Naym at
nicknaym@[remove_this].gmail.com wrote on 11/7/09 6:28 PM:

> In article fmoore-, Fred
> Moore at wrote on 11/7/09 11:58 AM:
> ..
>
> ..
>
>
>>
>> If it were my machine, I'd use OnyX (free/donationware) or equivalent to
>> turn on Show Invisibles.
>
> Someone here (damn, I forgot who!) recommended Invisibilty Toggler some time
> ago; it's a free one-click app that I really like:
> http://tinyurl.com/yhopahm
>

Now I remember (actually, I "went-a-searching" ) ... John Varela
recommended it, back in April in this forum in the thread "Time Machine
Prefs and Permissions". I have OnyX, TinkerTool, and a few others, but this
one-trick pony is the easiest and least intrusive to use.



--
iMac (24", 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 320 GB HDD) € OS X (10.5.8)

"Nick Naym" <nicknaym@[remove_this].gmail.com> wrote in message
news:C71B6CBE.4B448%nicknaym@[remove_this].gmail.com...
> In article fmoore-, Fred
> Moore at wrote on 11/7/09 11:58 AM:

>> If it were my machine, I'd use OnyX (free/donationware) or equivalent to
>> turn on Show Invisibles.
>
> Someone here (damn, I forgot who!) recommended Invisibilty Toggler some
> time
> ago; it's a free one-click app that I really like:
>

Why is it that most every piece of software you recommend is crap?