OS X V10.6 Snow Leopard :: 166Gb Of Free Space Not Showing In Finder
Jun 6, 2012
my Mac started saying I need to free up space on my Startup Disk. I was suprised, but as I've been doing some film work, I just thought it must take up even more space than I thought. Anway, I free'd up loads of spaced, I moved all my film files to an external disk, deleted them from where they were, and emptied the trash. I've got rid of other things like Internet cache and downloads, basically, I know i have space now. However, my Mac insists on saying I only have about 2Gb free. On another site, someone recommended something called Disk Inventory X, which gives a visual picture of what files etc are taking up space on the Mac. I ran this, and low and behold I have 166Gb free. The screen shot below shows the big blue square of free space. If you can zoom in, it shows this as something outside of the home 'Tiger' thing, under Users - .tiger, as though its partitioned or something?! I don't really understand how Mac's work under the hood of pretty buttons etc, so I'm a bit stuck now.
why my Mac can't see or let me use all this free space?
I am running Snow Leopard 10.6.8. It is a 13" mid 2009 MacBook Pro 5.5, 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4Gb 1067 MHz DDR3 if that's of any help.
Info:
MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2009), Mac OS X (10.6.8)
I was running Leopard 10.5.8 and my iMac 2.4GHz w/1GB Ram seemed to be getting slow. I upgraded to Snow Leopard. Without much running (Mail, Safari, iCal) it is very slow. At times, the free space has gotten down to 2.5MB in Activity Monitor. Nothing extraordinary seems to running when I open Activity Monitor. When I was trying to sync my iCal with MobileMe it really crawled.
I did a PRAM reset, ran Repair Disk with install disk and Disk Warrior without any errors.
everytime i try to install 10.6 it says i do not have enough free space in my macintosh hd. i have tried deleting things several times and i continue to receive the same message.
My Laptop runs slow and often spins when I open the browser or other apps sometimes and found the load average to be less than and also about 300MB free memory, till I notice swap as 40MB/256MB on iStat.
Questions: 1. How do I find out what process is causing the swap? The top does not show swap, and the vm_stat does not show swap either like vmstat does. 2. In the memory what does the wired, Active, Inactive memory mean? The only value that makes sense is Free.
Strange as it may seem, when I installed Snow Leopard, I immediately freed almost 40 gig on my Macbook pro (can't imagine why) and speed was increased by a factor of 2-3 times. One more thing is that parallels is now "almost" as fast as a native program, especially with Quicken for windows, which is the only reason that I use parallels.
My mac is slow. Obvious points are covered. Maximum RAM installed; All apple software updates downloaded and permissions repaired after each download.Activity Monitor shows no obvious 'hogs'.Hard Drive (250GB) has almost 50GB free I am considering some sort of clean up using something like ONYX but feel that the hardware /software package should be almost self maintaining.15 years using Macs, since OS5 but not minded to look under the hood very often, since that is what brought me to Apple in the first place.
Info: iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 3GB Ram
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I have the MacBook Pro 2010 13" and recently I've noticed my disc space is slowly decreasing with use.
Im not downloading files or anything, but today I lost around 600 MB of space, I just kept opening my Finder to discover less and less disc space each time.
Is this normal or do I have a problem, this is the first time I've noticed it in the month and a half I've owned the machine.
Out of the blue the sidebar on the left of the finder just disapeared.
I searched and foud some fixes like deleting .plist file and clicking the oval button on the top right of finder, and nothing works.
I know when I click on the oval it's suppos to appear, but it's not. The only thing that happens is that the top part hides and appears. I just want to get my finder the way it was. I actually have folders there for quick access and now it's gone.
I get the following message when I use syncmate & Finder to transfer files from my MacBook to my Samsung Omnia. I actually have 7gb of storage left when I get this message. It has only been a problem since the SL upgrade.
The item ClearTemp-v1.2.1.CAB cant be copied because there isnt enough free space.
I am using a Mac Mini, Which is having a capacity of 74.2 GB. Hardly I made use of 15 or 16 GB of that. As I felt some slowness, I tried running "Disk Utility". Recently I found that the free space is only 2.4GB, instead of around 55GB..
Disk Utility is showing USED SPACE :71.8GB
If i am calculating all folders in "Machintosh HD" (Application, Library,System, etc..), it wil come around 14-15 GB only.
I just cleaned out my HDD on my 2008 MBP and am still getting about the same amount of available space as I did when I started. I must have cleaned anywhere from 50-150GB of stuff from the hard drive and no space has been freed up. I ran a scan with my trusty Daisydick which has never let me down and it showd what I thought to be a very much more accurate amout of free space now but the system says otherise as dones another scanner. Also I cant seem to figure out for the life of me what this extra 99GB of "other" space is. Below is a link to the screenshot I took. I really try to keep things very light and tidy on here.
I have a 1TB external LaCie hard drive. Presently, it is loaded with about 300GBs of space so I should have around 650GBs left. However, it is only showing about 240GBs left. I think the problem is that I used to use this hard drive for Time Machine backups, I deleted them via the recycle bin. I checked the recycle bin, nothing there. I verified the disk, everything ok, I repaired it as well. I even erased the empty space.
I am trying to transfer files to a USB stick that I've been using for ages. About halfway through it won't transfer any more files and says they "can't be copied because there isn't enough free space". USB stick is totally empty and the size of the files is much less than the capacity of the stick
I have freed up 6 GB on my hard drive (unused capacity now 79/500 GB) and have repaired disk permissons. Repaired USB stick, tried a different stick, turned it off & turned it back on again. I'm at a loss as to what to try next.Also I could transfer the entire folder across, but then when I tried to get the files out of the folder directly onto the drive, the same thing happened. Also they all seem to be fine and I can access them on a PC which is why I need them on the stick.
I've read that 10.6 frees up space when it is installed. I'm currently on 10.4, PowerPC. Will 10.5 free up hard drive space if I install it? Or will it use about the same amount as 10.4? Also, is 10.5 now on sale because its "old"?
Yesterday I apparently interrupted Disk Utility when it was erasing free space, which was far bigger than the used space on my beloved black Macbook. Apparently the free space, because the program was interrupted, is seen as one honking big file.
This morning, the disk utility tells me that I have zero free space. Verify says I do not need repair. I checked because of all my sudden problems (I am unable to save anything to the laptop, unable to cut-and-paste . . . and unable to erase free space again since there officially isn't any, etc.).
Trash is empty.
I tried (based on advice in another thread) to reboot with the installation disk so as to use its disk utility program, but the installation disk menu offers "install" etc. but not (as far as I can tell) just access to its disk utility.
I plugged in my Timemachine external drive [WD MyBook], but the most recent "save" there has the "restore" button greyed out. That's scary.
I'm willing to do a complete re-install if necessary, but I hope that one of you has a simpler solution that will simply get my free space back.
Sometimes I simply cannot open a new finder window. If I use Command-N or if I choose New Finder Window in the Finder menu, nothing happens. If I am using Command-N, I can see the File heading in the Finder menu bar highlighting, and then after a few seconds the highlight goes, but no window opens. Also, clicking on my Downloads icon in the dock, the dialog opens showing all the files, but if I then click on Open in Finder, the dialog closes but nothing happens. Now that I am writing this message, it all works again! That's what I mean by 'sometimes'. This issue can last for tens of minutes. Secndly, and this is still a problem, my finder Preferences do not stick. So for instance, I don't want to see an icon for my hard disk on the desktop, so I untick this in Finder preferences. The icon disappears. If I now re-start, then it comes back. The same happens for removing the empty trash warning and all of the other Finder Preference tick boxes.
Now, when the first problem of not being able to open a finder window suddenly stopped being a problem, the icon for the hard disk suddenly appeared on my desktop. So the two issues are linked. This has been going on intermittently for a few days. I have verified my disk, and repaired permissions.
I only have like 8 gb left on my macbook's hard drive. Are there any programs I can run that will defrag/free up space? How much does Apple Store typically charge to upgrade a hard drive? How easy is it to do myself?
I've recently acquired an iMac and wanted to upgrade to Lion, however I believe I need to upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard first - which could prove to end up costing a fortune! I've read recently that Apple are offering the upgrade to Snow Leopard free of charge for MobileMe users, however when I've followed a link to fill in a request form, this just takes me to the Find My Phone feature on iCloud.
Is there a free way to run/emulate OS X Snow Leopard while running Leopard?
I had a billion problems when I upgraded to Snow Leopard but some software that I don't use frequently only works with it so I want to be able to run those apps while still staying in my less buggy OS X Leopard.
I don't want to have dual boot operating systems. OS X Leopard 10.5 is my primary OS.
I have read on apple news that apple is offering free software upgrade for leopard to snow leopard.. is that true? I followed their link and nothing is available?
I managed to interrupt the computer when I selected the "Erase Free Space" option. I had 0GB left on the computer and had to cancel almost all of the applications. I Googled and found that /var/root/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems should locate the file when entered in Terminal, but whenever I try that, it just says "Permission denied." It only asked for a password once, and when I tried entering it, it said that there was no such file. I located a few other temporary files and deleted those, and also tried making empty folders on the desktop to empty the trash. It freed up 6.7 GB, but there's still a lot of space missing. I'm not sure what else to try or how to get the space back.
Are there any free vnc apps that work with Snow Leopard? Tried Chicken of the VNC and JollysFast and neither work. I know about the Screen Sharing app, but I am having problems connecting to a Tiger computer, so want to try a separate VNC app...
I just experienced something totally weird on my Snow Leopard. It starts suddenly dropping in the free memory (green) in my activity monitor with around 10 MB per second and the inactive (purple) memory grows. And it doesn't stop until it hits 10 free MB.
