A few problems with Leopard running on my White iMac...

Question

I have only found 2 problems so far with Leopard running on my iMac. First off, the most annoying one:
Sometimes, especially when switching users, the screen turns to the "gray screen of death." You know, the one with the request to restart your computer in like 4 languages and a huge picture of a power button... anyway, it is getting quite annoying and I wish I could make it stop. It has also happened when I have been dealing with moving large amounts of data, "large pictures, movies, etc.)
And now, the second problem. I was just looking up the memory left on my hard drive when I noticed something I hadn't before. my 160gb hard drive had 50gb left. not too strange there. but when I checked through all the things (apps, users, system, library, developer, etc.) in it (I simply did apple-i and checked the gb each of them took up) and after a quick add-up on my calculator widget, all the things in the hard drive added up to 50gb. so I have 50gb free, 50gb used and a 160gb hard drive. How does that work? Do I need to do something to get that extra 60gb back or is it just gone???

Answer 1

STEVE!!! wrote:
Is there any way just to show hidden folders like on a PC?
There's probably a way to coerce Finder.app into showing everything
(all is possible in unix) -- but I don't know the OS-X magic words.
It told me that improper of the "sudo" command could lead to data loss
and i don't want to risk doing anything stupid (like a misspelling) that
could lead to my hard drive being wrecked.
Good advice. IMO, the 'du' (disk usage) command is safe, because it's
'read only' -- but I undestand that you'd be hesitant to trust your data
to advice fom an anonymous voice from "The Internets." I can't/won't
argue with common sense.
You can run the same command without the 'sudo' prefix. It might
miss a few things and/or spit some 'permission denied' messages,
but the results will at least be a lower-bound of disk usage.
...in the beginning was the command line,
Looby