[X4U] Hard drive space

[Neil Laubenthal]

On Jan 25, 2008, at 11:42, Robert wrote:

> So far nothing has worked. I have tried everything that everyone has  
> suggested. If I reboot I will have 40 gb and I can watch it drop.  
> Last resort will be to back up and reformat and do a clean install.  
> Not looking forward to doing that  but it will be a last resort. It  
> would be nice to figure out what is causing this. As I had 10.4 on  
> this drive before installing 10.5 I wonder if there is something  
> that I had on the drive that 10.5 does not like. Anyway thanks for  
> all of the suggestions.  Bob

Before you try that . . . try this instead.

Boot and immediately after boot run Disk Inventory X or Grand  
Perspective. Grand Perspective gives a nice picture of what is using  
space . . . when I look at my drive with this I get a block about 1  
inch by 2 inches for the largest single file on my drive (a 7.5  
GB .dmg file of the Leopard distribution DVD). Disk Inventory X gives  
a list based representation sorted by folder size.

Grab a screen shot of whichever you use . . . noting either the  
largest file or the largest folder depending on which app you use  
(Disk Inventory X will probably give you a quicker answer).

Whatever is taking up all your drive space . . .it's likely NOT the  
swap files . . . they don't grow that fast and don't grow at all if  
you're not launching/quitting apps, etc.

Now . . .wait awhile until your available drive space has  
significantly decreased . . . say from 40 GB free down to 10 GB free.

Run the disk analyzer again (Disk Inventory X recommended as noted  
above) . . . and whatever folder has gotten bigger will jump to the  
top of the list. Navigate through the folder that is suddenly larger  
and whatever large file or folder is the culprit should be relatively  
easy to figure out.

My guess is still console logs, if the space continues to go down  
until the drive is full then this seems the only likely candidate to  
me . . .it's certainly not VM. Have you checked to make sure that they  
aren't the problem (launch console and the left pane will show you the  
locations of the various log files . . . navigate separately in Finder  
to those locations and look for huge files. It's likely _not_ a whole  
buttload of small files; it's much more likely to be a single really  
large file that is eating up the space.

neil