The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Weird disk space issue (lost 30GB???)

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by drewdeezee, Dec 31, 2007.

  1. drewdeezee

    drewdeezee Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    25
    Messages:
    43
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    Short story: Finder reports 60+GB free space on disk, woke up this morning with only 30 GB free space on disk.

    Long story:
    Specs - Macbook 2.0 C2D
    Leopard 10.5.1 installed from scratch 3 weeks ago
    200GB Seagate hard drive (186.3GB recognized by disk utility)

    The hard drive has 2 partitions:

    1. Macintosh HD 164.88 GB
    2. Bootcamp 21.12 GB

    Activity Monitor shows that the Macintosh HD has
    Total 164.88 GB
    Space utilized: 134.85 GB
    Space free: 30.02 GB
    [​IMG]

    Finder reports that Macintosh HD's size is 134.86 GB as well.
    [​IMG]


    Now the issue:
    When I look into Macintosh HD, the total GB usage only shows 91.91 GB.
    [​IMG]


    I'm a recent switcher for Windows XP. Is there anything I may be missing? Are there any runaway processes that I should be aware of? Any runaway log files that I should look for? I swear there were 60+ gigs of free disk space left last night.

    The only weird thing that I've noticed (and also annoyed by) is the mds process using up lots of resources and turning the fans on. I've learned that mds is a Spotlight indexing process. Would this be the culprit?

    Thanks in advance for any advice.
     
    drewdeezee, Dec 31, 2007
    #1
  2. drewdeezee

    drewdeezee Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    25
    Messages:
    43
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    Here are the screen shots.
     

    Attached Files:

    drewdeezee, Dec 31, 2007
    #2
  3. taelrak

    taelrak Lost

    Reputations:
    860
    Messages:
    2,979
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    55
    Could be just that it didn't refresh the size...

    But in any event you could DL something like OmniDiskSweeper which will show you what your HDD space is used for.
     
    taelrak, Dec 31, 2007
    #3
  4. M@lew

    M@lew Notebook Evangelist

    Reputations:
    38
    Messages:
    442
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    30
    Trash something big but haven't emptied it?
     
    M@lew, Jan 1, 2008
    #4
  5. drewdeezee

    drewdeezee Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    25
    Messages:
    43
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    Thanks for the advice taelrak and M@lew!

    The trash is definitely empty. I'm thinking that it just didn't refresh the size because the issue seemed to have resolved itself. It's back to 60+ GB free space after several hours of the mds process and the mdworker process at almost 100% cpu utilization. I guess I just had to let Spotlight finish its indexing but that thing is a B!+CH because it hogs up resources several times per day and causing the Macbook to lag and give me the beach ball for simple tasks like opening Finder windows or surfing webpages.
     
    drewdeezee, Jan 1, 2008
    #5