Clearing The Hard Disk

Hello All,
I just bought my mac mini from my brother, for the soul purpose of using Final Cut Express HD. Well my problem is that I can't import videos becasue there is only about a Gig of memory left on the hard disk. I don't know how so much space got used up but about 72 GB is used up right now. Can someone tell me a way to start fresh with the hard disk, not delete everything but to just clear out all his old crap? I would appreciate it. Thanks a lot.

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
When obtaining a Mac from another person, it would usually be a good thing to simply reformat it and reinstall MacOS and the software you need, to make sure you don't end up with a system full of potential issues resulting from it's prior use. If you have the original install disk that came with the mini, you can do this by inserting it, then rebooting the system with the C key held down. This forces the mini to boot from the install disk.
From there, select 'erase and install'. This will erase all data (so don't do this if you need something already on there) and then install a fresh copy of MacOS. After that, when the system reboots it'll be the same as if it just came out of the box, and will ask you a few basic configuration questions and then to register it.
If you absolutely must keep the existing MacOS install, beware that the system will barely run with so little free space on the drive. You'll need to clear a fair bit of that at the very least! The easiest tool for the purpose of tracing what is taking up the used space is a freeware app called 'WhatSize'. You can download it from www.versiontracker.com and use it to examine what is on the drive, thus allowing you to find and remove unwanted material quickly.
By the way, to the other poster - no, Mac Janitor cannot be the cause of the problem you describe because it doesn't do anything that impacts the functionality of MacOS. It simply runs some basic log trimming and clearing tasks.

Similar Messages

How Can I clear the hard drive and install Tiger?

I bought a used iBook. I do not have the original discs, but I do have Tiger on DVD. Is it possible to clear the hard drive completley and put on a fresh copy of Tiger? How can I do this?

Rolesh:
Formatting, Partitioning Erasing a Hard Disk Drive
• With computer shut down insert install disk in optical drive.
• Hit Power button and immediately after chime hold down the "C" key.
• Select language
• Go to the Utilities menu (Tiger) Installer menu (Panther & earlier) and launch Disk Utility.
• Select your HDD (manufacturer ID) in left side bar.
• Select Partition tab in main panel. (You are about to create a single partition volume.)
• Click on Options button
• Select Apple Partition Map (PPC Macs) or GUID Partition Table (Intel Macs)
• Click OK
• Select number of partitions in pull-down menu above Volume diagram.
(Note 1: One partition is normally preferable for an internal HDD.)
• Type in name in Name field (usually Macintosh HD)
• Select Volume Format as Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
• Click Partition button at bottom of panel.
• Select Erase tab
• Select the sub-volume (indented) under Manufacturer ID (usually Macintosh HD).
• Check to be sure your Volume Name and Volume Format are correct.
• Click Erase button
• Quit Disk Utility.
Open installer and begin installation process.
Installation Process
(If you are still booted from the install disk skip first three steps)
• With computer shut down insert install disk in optical drive.
• Hit Power button and immediately after chime hold down the "C" key.
• Select language
• Open Installer and begin installation.
• Select installation option
• Choose to Customize and deselect Foreign Language Translations and Additional Printer drivers.
Optional: Check box to install X11 (Tiger and later) BSD Subsystems (Panther & earlier).
• Proceed with installation.
• After installation computer will restart for setup.
• After setup, reboot computer.
• Go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.
• Select your HDD (manufacturer ID) in left side bar.
• Select First Aid in main panel.
• Click Repair Disk Permissions.
• Connect to Internet.
• Download and install Mac OS X 10.4.11 Combo update (PPC) (Tiger)
Computer will restart.
• Repair Disk Permissions as previously.
• Go to Apple Menu > Software Update.
• Install all updates.
Computer may restart after updates.
• Go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.
• Select your HDD (manufacturer ID) in left side bar.
• Select First Aid in main panel.
• Click Repair Disk Permissions.
Please post back with questions, comments or update.
Good luck.
cornelius

Does "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible) work with external drive

I have an external backup drive which I use for doing daily backups. I have set an iCal alarm daily to remind me to turn the hdd on at the right time.
When Time Machine comes along in a couple weeks, I am going to be leaving this drive on all the time while I'm working on my computer but was wondering if the energy savings mode of putting the hard drive to sleep applies to external USB drives as well? Would be nice to know that when I put my computer to sleep at the end of the day that my external drive also goes to sleep. I'm not sure if this has to be a function of the external box or if OS X can shut off the drive.
Any wisdom?

You can test this very easily:
The "Put the hard disk(S) to sleep when possible" default time is 10 minutes of inactivity.
Just leave your Mac alone for 10 minutes: you should hear both drives spinning down. If the external noise was not clear enough, you can then "wake it up" by double-clicking its icon on the desktop:
If it was spun down, you'll have to wait a couple of seconds or so, with the spinning colored beachball, while it is spinning up again.
Note that if you're performing a task that uses only you Mac's internal HD, the external should spin down while you're using your Mac. Then if double-clicking its icon shows the colored spinning beachball stalling, it's very clear it goes to sleep as intended.
Most of the external hard drives should be able to spin down, at least all my LaCie do it with no problem.

How do I return my mid 2011 MacBook Air to Factory Specifications? Can I use the built in Lion recovery and wipe my data from the hard disk by reformatting it?

I want to trade in my old mid 2011 MacBook Air for a new MacBook Pro. After I have transferred my data to the new MacBook Pro, how do I reformat the hard disk to wipe all my data and return it to Factory specifications? Will the built in Lion recovery allow me to do this? I am currently running OS X Yosemite. Has the upgrade to Yosemite damaged or removed the original Lion recovery partition?

Click here and follow the instructions.
(124038)

I have a 2nd gen Mac book air with Lion. The hard disk has filled up even though i keep my data , music etc on hard drive . I used disk inspector to find where problem was and it is 20GB in the hidden files under the user directory can i resolve this ?

I have a 2nd Gen MAc book Air with Lion . The 60GB hard disc has quickly filled up despite me keeping most of my data on a portable hard drive . I used disk inspector to locate the problem but found that it was was in 20 GB of hidden files in my user directory . Is this correct and is there anything i can do about it ? Using disk inspector you can not see individual hudden diretories or files. I did unhide them but there is a mass of diretories etc and so no way i could see if this is one or multiple files using the space. Library System and Applications are at 4 3 and 3 GB respectvely. The data I actually keep on there is 9GB Thanks for any help

I think the problem is Quick Time Player. I am using OS 10.6.8 by the way.
I tried it out again.
I had about 26 GB of space before I played an .avi video.
After the movie started to play (it was slow to load), I got a warning message that my startup disk was full. I opened Disk Utility and it told me I had no space left (about 20 MB or something like that was left).
I watched to the end of the movie.
Then I quit Quicktime Player.
And I shut down the computer.
I turned on the computer and checked Disk Utility. I have about 26 GB of space.
I think for some reason Quicktime Player uses up a lot of the disk space when it runs movies that are problematic. This movie I was watching did not open with vlc.
I normally use vlc to watch movies.
Probably it doesn't use up this much space when the movie is OK.
I think there's a problem with this particular movie. It is about 50 MB so it's not that big a file. I watch .smi subtitles with it. The Quicktime Player automatically loads the subtitle file in this case because the subtitle file has the same name as the movie file.
I watched about 10 movie files from the same series that I downloaded together and did not have any problem watching them. I watched them on vlc. But this latest movie had problems I think (as I repeat). It did not load on vlc even though I waited for a minute, and normally movies load instantly on vlc.
So I think that movie file caused problems. It made QT player use up a lot of hard disk space.
I had better avoid watching that movie in the future. I don't want it to wreck my hard drive.
So to sum up, everything is back to normal. I have the hard disk space that I should have. However, I am scared of damaging my hard drive due to shonky movie files that eat up all the space when they are played using QT player, and so I will not watch those files in the future, as I do not know why the files do that.

How can i access the hard disk and know the no of partitions

sir
i want to access the hard disk and know how many parttions the hard disk have means c,d,e,f,g or may be c,d,e? also volum no or serial no.
but i do not know how?
plz help me and send me a code
thanks in advance
if this quesstion is not related to this forum plz guide me that where i put this quesstion?

You figure out how to do it on your OS using C/C++ code.
Then you write a wrapper in JNI to call your C/C++ code.

Error while opening the Hard-disk

Hi all I am not anle to open the hard-disk. Initially it shows My passport as drive name now ir just shows "E:\" When I try to openthe drive it says - "E:\ is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable. Id ask me to formate when I connect to my laptop. I have my sensitive data in it and can not formate it. -Divya

If you have not backup the data, then you can try data recovery software to retrieve the data.

Ello, I changed my Imac hard drive which no longer worked. I installed a hard drive Western Digital 500 GB 7200 rpm SATA3 WD5002AALX 32M Black. Sometimes I see the hard disk in the utility on the Starter CD, but access seems very slow. By cons when I want

Hello, I changed my Imac hard drive which no longer worked. I installed a hard drive
Western Digital 500 GB 7200 rpm SATA3 WD5002AALX 32M Black. Sometimes I see the hard disk in the utility on the Starter CD, but access seems very slow. By cons when I want
install OS X 10.4.2 on the hard drive, I do not see the disk. What is the problem?

Thanks for the help
I started on the installation CD OS X 10.4.2, I used Disk Utility
to partition the disk according to the document that you have proposed. unfortunately
I have not succeeded. When I partition the disk, even if I called it Macintosh HD, it
does not keep the name and it shows disk0s3 instead. I did an erase on disk.
When I mount the disk it tells me that I must repair. When I tried to repair, I got
the following message:
Volume check failed
The underflying task reported failure on exit
1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error.
I also had a message:
Invalid b-tree node size.
Note: The disc is new, but it has already been formatted on a computer Imac 27 inch 2011 OS X Lion.
I used a USB 2.0 to SATA cable to adjust the formatting.
What to do to fix it?

Had to buy a new PC as the hard disk of the old one broke and lost all purchases, but still have them on the iPhone. How can I sync them back to the new PC in iTunes?

Had to buy a new PC as the hard disk of the old one broke and lost all purchases, but still have them on the iPhone. How can I sync them back to the new PC in iTunes without losing them?

You should be able to:
Backup the device to the new installation
Transfer your purchases into a newly authorized library
Recover any other media using third party tools as suggested in this post from forum regular Zevoneer
Restore the device from the backup
This process should switch the association of the device to the new library, preserving the data and settings in your apps.
May also be prudent to attempt a backup to iCloud directly from the device before you start... Settings > iCloud > Storage & Backup > iCloud Backup > On. It won't save any media but it would preserve the general account settings and documents in case anything goes wrong while you are trying to extract your other data.
When you get it all fixed, make a backup!
tt2

It seems like I just missed the interval for the hard disk replacement program. I purchased in March 2009 a 24 inch Intel iMac . How much does it cost to have apple support at an Apple Store replace a hard drive?

It seems like I just missed the interval for the hard disk replacement program. I purchased in March 2009 a 24 inch Intel iMac . How much does it cost to have apple support at an Apple Store replace a hard drive?

My hard drive continually has the floating beach ball and will take massive time to fulfill a request. And then will not boot up...so then I have to do a restore and rebuild hard drive from a past saved time machine version. Works for a little bit...then the floating beachball comes more and more...until it will not boot up again. So then I restore from a previous time machine saved version....and again it works for a day or so ... until it happens again. Now it's happening faster and faster...so I think my hard drive is dying.

Windows 8.1 Hyper-V - Error while configuring the hard disk 0xC03A0014

Hello. I have just enabled Hyper-V on my Windows 8.1 laptop.
Dell Latitude E7440 i7-4600U @ 2.10GHz
I can create a Virtual-Switch but I am unable to create a new Hard Disk or Virtual Machine within Hyper-V. I get the same error for both processes.
Error: The Virtual Machine Management Service encountered an error while configuring the hard disk on virtual machine New Virtual Machine.
Failed to create the virtual hard disk.
The system failed to create C:\Users\user\Documents\Test\New.vhdx .
Failed to create the virtual hard disk
The system failed to create C:\Users\user\Documents\Test\New.vhdx . A Virtual disk support provider for the specified file was not found. (0xC03A0014).
I have ran all Dell Client System updates and all of windows updates.
I have attempted to create a virtual machine on the current SSD and also an external drive. The same error appears.
I have also attempted to create a virtual hard disk via Hyper-v with a Base vhdx, still the same error occurs. I've tested the base image on other laptops of the same model and windows 8.1 without issue.
Any thoughts on how I can fix this?
Thank you,
-Jake

Hi Jake,
"Enable Data Execution Protection (DEP) in the BIOS and make sure the Format of drive file system is not fat32.
1. Uninstall Intel Active System Monitor 3.0, if installed.
2. Disable "Intel IPMI Service" and "Intel Monitoring Agent" Service.
3. Open regedit and locate: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\imbdrv.
4. Change the Start Key to 4 (Disabled).
5. Locate HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E97D-E325-11CE-BFC1-0 8002BE10318}.
6. Take ownership of the ‘Properties’ key.
7. Give yourself full permission for this key.
8. Now locate the properties key; if you see a ‘Security’ entry there, that is your problem. Delete this key.
9. Try attaching or adding the VHD again after rebooting.
If above steps did not help, add the Network Service account to Local Administrator group."
It is quoted from the similar thread below :
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/55085ff3-0f26-41bd-b590-bb3490e2d6f5/win-7-professional-a-virtual-disk-support-provider-for-the-specified-file-was-not-found?forum=w7itprovirt
Hope it helps
Best Regards
Elton Ji
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are trying to better understand customer views on social support experience, so your participation in this
interview project would be greatly appreciated if you have time.
Thanks for helping make community forums a great place.

Replacing the hard disk on an iBook G3 (700 Dual USB)

Hi
I'm kind of regarded as the guy to go and see when anything goes wrong with a Mac, here in Athens, Greece. But I have very little hardware experience with laptops. A friend of mine just brought me her iBook G3 (700 Dual USB), running Panther 10.3.9 to check out. She was getting the initial start up screen (grey Apple, spinning wheel) and once in every ten times or more actually getting into her hard disk. Anyway after a bunch of tests I narrowed the problem down to the hard disk (40 gig, I think). The disc is basically presenting all the symptoms of a damaged disc. I can not even wipe and reinstall on it. When I start up from the Panther system CD, it runs normally, up to the point where I tell it to install, it goes to the next screen where you choose your destination disc, and shows, nothing! Disk Utility on the install disc sees the hard disk and identifies it as an IBM, but the single partition with Panther installed is greyed out. I tells me that the disk can't be wiped because of an ERROR -20. I also tried mounting it on my G4 as a firewire external, and in fact managed to rescue the data, (though it took an hour to transfer 250 kb of data). I even tried to wipe it in my own machine as an external disc, but again the same problem. Strangely enough Disk Utility says the disc does not need repair.
Anyway, I decided to change the disk and be done with it. But as I say I have very little hardware experience with laptops, and the Apple support pages don't have any documents that show the internal workings of the iBook, except for how to change memory and install Airport cards. Aside from the fact that I still have to figure out where to find a new disc for the machine, I don't really want to open it up until I can check some instructions.
Can anyone give me a clue how you get inside these machines? I have a Powerbook G4 manual which does shows how to open it up and change the HD, but I'm not sure how similar these two models are internally.
So I'd appreciate any clue as to the procedure for opening these babies up. Thanks in advance.

It's not an easy thing to do. Arm yourself with a tiny screwdriver and loads of patience:
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/50.12.0.html
http://www.powerbooktech.com/knowledge,name-Hard-Drive,type-6.htm
http://uk.geocities.com/ibookupgrade/
http://sterpin.net/uk/ddibookdualuk.htm
Good luck!

My system is asking to run the hard disk test run...What i have to do? can any one guide me????

model is Hp Pavilion g6.. windows 7 home basic,
My system is asking to run the hard disk test run.. i have run , there was no error, but the message is still comming, i do not kow whether i amdoing it in a right way or not.. Please any giude do that test and find the issue.....

Hi,
If you receive this message when starting the notebook, try the following.
Shut down the notebook. Tap away at f10 as you start the notebook to enter the bios menu. Under the Advanced or Diagnostic tab you should find the facility to run a test on the Hard Drive. Post back with the details of any error messages.
If you receive this message while Windows is running , click the Start Menu, click Computer, left click Local Disc C once to highlight it, right click Local Disc C and select Properties. Click the Tools tab and then click the button to 'Check the Drive for Errors'. In the following window make sure both boxes are ticked and then click Start. Agree to schedule the check at the next system restart and then restart the notebook - this process can take a couple of hours to complete before loading back into Windows.
Regards,
DP-K
****Click the White thumb to say thanks****
****Please mark Accept As Solution if it solves your problem****
****I don't work for HP****
Microsoft MVP - Windows Experience

Help! My iMac doesn't see the hard disk!

My old, reliable iMac (the old sunflower flat panel) suddenly froze up and when I did a hard break and restarted it, the dreaded folder with a question mark appeared.
I tried starting it from an installation disk--which it did with no problems except it still didn't see the hard disk. I tried inserting the Apple Hardware Test disk, which worked. I ran it and it said everything was OK, but when I hit the Restart button it still didn't see my hard drive.
I'm at my wit's end because, being a freelancer, I have a lot of important information on my iMac, which I stupidly haven't backed up for a long time. I have a little hope because the Apple Hardware Test ran and didn't find any problems (the Mass Storage test passed, which I'm assuming is the hard disk?).
PLEASE! Can anyone help me? My main objective is to get my data off of the disk and onto either my PowerBook or my external USB hard drive.
Thanks for any advice,
Karin

I tried starting it from an installation disk--which it did with no problems except it still didn't see the hard disk.
Are you saying your drive did not show up in Disk Utility? Did you Try using Disk Utility to do a Disk Repair, as shown in this link, while booted up on your install disk.
Let us know what errors Disk Utility reports and if DU was able to repair them.
I'm at my wit's end because, being a freelancer, I have a lot of important information on my iMac, which I stupidly haven't backed up for a long time.
I think we have all been there! If you need help with a better backup strategy, let us know!
PLEASE! Can anyone help me? My main objective is to get my data off of the disk and onto either my PowerBook or my external USB hard drive.
You can retrieve data using Target Disk Mode to your PowerBook. That's if the drive shows up.
Also, here is Apple doc.#58042 on the flashing ? mark!
Cheers! DALE

Increase the hard disk drive capacity on a MacBook Air

is it possible to increase the hard disk drive capacity from 64 to 128 G? How do I do it?

It would appear Apple does not intend for you to do it.
It might be possible, if expensive.
I would consider an external drive.
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Clearing The Hard Disk

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