What’s Wrong with the Mac Pro?
I have a lazy Web Question. I’ve been working on this most of the day and I can’t find a solution.
My system disk is almost full according to a warning I received earlier today. It’s a 300GB drive and I don’t store many files on it. It’s primarily applications and system files. iTunes has a handful of songs. iPhoto is empty. All the apps that store files are empty. My Final Cut scratch disk is on a Drobo. There is no reason this drive should be even half full, but if I Get Info on the system disk it says I’m using 297.87GB of 300GB.
I ran OmniDiskSweeper and it only found that I was using 146.71GB of disk space. I ran Filelight and it showed me using 140GBs.
What am I missing? Thanks in advance!
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One of the people in this thread (http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=830953) used http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/ to find the source of the confusion with success, then deleted the log files it turned up. The other one just did a clean install to fix it.
Also, if you go the first route, http://www.daisydiskapp.com/ has a much cleaner interface than Grand Perspective, but also costs $20.
I’ve never run into this specific problem, but it’s a very interesting one.
Good luck Neal!
Billy
I ran grandperspective and it also says I’m only using about 140GB.
At the risk of stating the obvious, run repair in Disk Utility, but assuming that changes nothing, maybe try having a program like OnyX (http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english/apps.html) clean the machine. If you had 32 GB of RAM you might have very large swap files or sleep images lurking around; I’m not sure but some programs might not see those.
I had similar problems to this and ended up using Terminal.app to find what was taking the space but not being picked up by Finder and the likes. I didn’t find a better way than running the command:
sudo du -hmc -d 1
from / for an overview and then drilling down. For example, when I run this from my home directory I’ll see entries (snipped) like:
7757 ./Desktop
27912 ./Documents
114 ./Downloads
23 ./Dropbox
and realise that I should stop dropping stuff on my Desktop – there’s ~7GB there.
Neal … try “what size”.
Google found lots of sources, even version tracker. Finds everything you’ve got and tells you how big each is. A Mac Genius showed me this when I had same problem.
Sounds like directory corruption. Best tool for this job is still the Disk Warrior program. Do you already have this tool handy?
A couple of additional things to add about this Mac Pro.
-It’s an SAS drive
-Drive was full after a clean instal of Snow Leopard + restore from Time Machine
-Yes, the trash is empty.
-Not running Dropbox
-Grand Perspective says only 140GB are used
-Tried OnyX
-Repaired Disk Permissions
Now I’m working my way through the rest of the suggestions.
Neal,
Also simply safe-booting your MacPro clears out a lot of these issues because in 10.6 it clears out unnecessary caches and does a lot of disk/directory integrity checks and file structure/permission checks and fixes.
- Joseph
To avoid the fustrations of diagnosing an issue, my tried and true way of dealing is to do a clean install and/or clone. You mentioned that your drive became full after the Snow leopard install + time cap restore.
Since you don’t know if the install went wrong or if the restore went wrong, I suggest getting a 300 gb drive (weather it be a sata or another sas drive) and run Carbon Copy Cloner. Make sure the clone is bootable and see if the full hardrive issue is replicated. If the issue is transfered when you boot from that new drive, then that tells you it’s not a hardware issue.
Since you made an exact clone of your hard drive already, It’s now safe to see if a full clean slate install on your original drive will fix the bug, making sure drive is formated correctly and wouldn’t hurt to repartion for good measure. Once you boot up for the first time, you can now do a transfer files and settings (from the clone)when the welcome screen prompts you.
If your issue is still there, there might be hidden files getting up on ya space killa! and ya to destroy!!!