[X Newbies] How the Grinch Stole 45GB of My Hard Drive

[Randy B. Singer]

Aaron Dickey said:

>I wish I could provide some actual _information_ about my problem, but 
>I'm afraid I can't say much except the basic facts. I'm using a 17-inch 
>iMac, 512MB, 80GB. In practice, of course, that 80GB was more like 
>60-65GB, which is fine. Except that sometime during the last 3 days or 
>so (if that long) around 40GB of that space has simply disappeared.


This problem is covered on my Web site:

How To Deal With
Common Macintosh OS X 10.2 Jaguar
Problems

http://www.macattorney.com/tutorial.html

under item # 13.  

Your disk can fill up with log files.  This can happen even if you leave 
your Mac on all the time, if you let your Mac go to sleep.

Even if you don't put your Mac to sleep all of the time, keep in mind 
that there are daily, monthly, and weekly maintenance routines.  

If your hard drive has always been missing a huge chunk of space, it 
might be a good idea to run Disk Utility and see how many partitions 
there are.  Shockingly, sometimes Apple blocks off a portion of a 
brand-new drive.  See:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=11148

If none of this helps, let me know.  There are other, less likely, 
possibilities.




Randy B. Singer
Co-Author of: The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th and 6th editions)

Claiming that the Macintosh is inferior to Windows because most people 
use Windows, is like saying that all other restaurants serve food that is 
inferior to McDonalds'.