Difference in reporting free space on my drive

Hi all,
I have a macbook pro 2011 running Lion on a 500GB HDD. I am having a small issue in reading how much free space do I have on my hard drive.
The status bar in the Finder window reports:
DiskUtility.app reports:
I don't have any partitions on the hard drive (other than what Lion creates on it's own) and "Macintosh HD" is the only drive I have. I do use time machine and I have already disabled local backups but the difference in free space stays. I am just not sure what is causing this huge difference. If it was a couple of GBs I'd happily ignore but this is more than 80GB.
Any idea?

malikons wrote:
the next day Finder synced with DiskUtility automagically. I think it takes time to remove the local backups.
Yes, especially on a busy system, and if there were a lot of files involved.
I rebooted my macbook into recovery mode and fixed the hard drive errors. So, I believe, fixing the HDD errors and disabling local backups eventually fixed the issue.
Yup, directory errors can cause all sorts of weirdness.

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I made a dumb decision to 'Erase Free Space' on my drive. I now have no free space, I realize because it wrote 0's over all my free space. Is there a way to undo this??? Help please I can't save any documents now! Thanks in advance all, it is truly apprec

I made a dumb decision to 'Erase Free Space' on my drive. I now have no free space, I realize because it wrote 0's over all my free space. Is there a way to undo this??? Help please I can't save any documents now! Thanks in advance all, it is truly appreciated. how can find the hidden temporary files using the terminal what do i type in?

It's more likely a failed Erase Free Space, which creates a huge temporary file; that's why it looks like you have no more available drive space. You can recover from this. See these links
https://discussions.apple.com/message/10938738#10938738
http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/quickie/recovering_from_a_failed_secure_erase_fre e_space
Post back if you need any help with this.

How do I get Finder windows to display free space on hard drive?

In Snow Leopard if you opened a Finder window, at the bottom it would show how much free space your hard drive had left. Lion by default does not do this. Is there a way where I can turn that option on so i can view space availible when opening Finder windows?

Stop blaming yourself. You're not an idiot and it's never the user's fault. It's always the designer's fault. Read "The Design of Everyday Things' by Donald Norman. It's a gerat book about how everyday things can be just difficult to use. He's been also a former Apple employee. Great reading!

Erasing Free Space on boot drive

I am getting ready to sell my older Mac Book Air with a SSD. I would like to erase all free space on the drive to assure that any confidential data I hadn't securely deleted earlier is not recoverable. In my most recent cleanup, I moved all my own files and installed apps to the trash and attempted to empty the trash securely. When the number of files to be removed was down to 30,000 (from neaerly 100,000) it stopped securely removing them. I rebooted several times and those files were still in the trash. I attempted each time to securely empty the trash. It would pop up the progress dialog box but would immeidately close it cleaning up nothing. Finally, I switched to non-secure and emptied the Trash.
I've done to the Disk Utility, selected the SSD Drive (Macintosh HD) and selected the Erase tab. The Erase Free Space button is disabled. How can I securely clean up the free space so that whoever buys the system will not be able to recover whatever, confidential data may still be hanging around in the free disk space list?
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read this article, it is outdated, but the info in it is still relevant: http://support.apple.com/kb/TA24002. Do a 7 pass erase. That conformed to the U.S. Department of Defense's security procedures until they changed their rules to that of completely destroying hard drives physically instead.

Re: Oggetto: Re: Knowing the free space on a drive

-----Original Message-----
From: Luca Gioppo <[email protected]>
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Date: Friday, March 19, 1999 9:13 AM
Subject: Oggetto: Re: Knowing the free space on a drive
Obviously the solut

I thanks people that gave their suggestion, but unfortunately these are not
what I was looking for.
The runcommand does not redirect output to a textdata but accept the name
of an output file in a textdata, and in win95 it doesn't exists a grep
command.
The thing that bother me is that if I use the environment console, open the
machine agent and look up the instruments i find the volumes into it,
afterwards having done this operation I manage to find the volume agents
form the machine one even from tool program.
It is clear that the e-console issues some commands during the instrument
menu of the machine that I miss, but perhaps are available from tool.
Does someone from Forte knows how to reproduce the same commands of
instrument menu in tool (I was told that e-console was written using forte
so...)?
TIA
Luca Gioppo
To unsubscribe, email '[email protected]' with
'unsubscribe forte-users' as the body of the message.
Searchable thread archive <URL:http://pinehurst.sageit.com/listarchive/>

Determine Drive Info From Crystal Reports - Free Space & Drive Size

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I know you can report on files and directories but I'm looking to report:
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Is it possible to use Visual Basic or Crystal commands to provide this info?
Any help would be much appreciated.

Please re-post if this is still an issue to the Legacy Application Development SDKs Forum or purchase a case and have a dedicated support engineer work with you directly
No, Crystal Reports does not have any system API's. Search VB help file for more info on accessing drive space info.

Does Erase Free Space Degrade Hard Drive?

I've noticed with my macbook that erasing free space takes bloody ages, 2 hours for 1 pass, 18 for 7 pass, 3 days for 35 pass.
This seems like an awful long time to have your laptop sitting on and open let alone your disc spinning and writing. Does this process degrade, slow down or have any seriously harmful side-effects to your hard drive?

My question is simply, 3 days of nonstop writing to zero out free space from insecure trash empties (some people might have important goverment docs, I don't know) seems like long enough to burn out your drive in one single process, no?
No, not unless the drive is already perilously close to failure when you begin the process.
And with their awkward sleep with lid closed standard feature, you have to leave the laptop sitting open and running... 3 days, surely that'll cause some problems?
Are you concerned that running the computer with its display open is hazardous to its health? Nothing could be farther from the truth. It cools itself more efficiently with the display open than with the display closed. Apart from that, having the lid open or closed makes no difference at all.
Out of curiosity, what do you consider "awkward" about having the computer go to sleep when you close the display?
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What was involved in making Firefox more compatible with Yahoo? Assuming that the "yt" part stands for Yahoo Toolbar, you could disable that temporarily to see whether that resolves the issue.
Try here:
orange Firefox button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons > Extensions category
Disable the Yahoo toolbar(s) and if a link appears to restart Firefox, click that as the last step.
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The second partition is not for backups... it's for a FAT filesystem for installing Windows so that I can run my research software and play games at native speed.
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Im having a hard drive issue.
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I'm attempting to install windows and the assistant gives about 100gb of space but I'd like 200 or so for windows.
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You have two issues.
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Some of the newer PC's don't have internal drive space because they have raid'ed drives.
I purchased 3 external 1Tb drives, 2 at home 1 at my office and I backup (never mind how to the office, that's a whole other thing) to one at home and one at the office -- and my phots are on the other 1Tb at home.
They cost me $99 each, but shortly after they become $69 each -- not much given the cost of the photos!

How to reclaim "free space" on TM drive?

I had 2 partitions on my external drive. I've deleted one of them as it is no longer need. Is there a way I can tell my TM partition to reclaim this new "free space" without having to erase the entire disk?
Thanks

Dryvlyne wrote:
That's exactly what I did to erase the partition, however, that partition is/was positioned first on the drive, above the TM partition. Hopefully that makes sense, but that's where I'm stuck at.
Thanks
in that case you can not absorb it into the other partition without reformatting the whole drive (that will wipe all the data off it). At least you can not do it with disk utility. Using disk utility you can only adjust the size of a partition by dragging its lower right end up or down.

How to format "free space" on a drive?

I bought a 2 TB hard drive and created a 1.5 TB partition in ExFat format. The other 500 Mb was left as "Free space". I thought that I could format that free space later, but now I don't see a way to do so. When I select that partition in Disk Utilities all the options seem to be grayed out. Is it possible to format "free space"?

You would have to delete the partition and add a new one.

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I have a Powerbook G4 with a 100GB hard drive. For almost a year, I've had about 60GB used and about 40GB free. All of a sudden, My free space dropped to 12.4GB.
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Next, I downloaded Whatsize, which calculated my total usage at around 27GB. Even stranger but it did corroborate my rough estimate.
I'm trying to determine why the bottom of my Finder windows say that I only have 12.4GB free when I should have a lot more than that.
I emptied that trash!
One more thing. I recently bought a Maxtor networked storage device and I backed up my entire hard drive onto it. I also bought a second iPod Nano.
Can anyone tell me what is going on?
Thanks

More like 5 GB free; you can improve matters somewhat by using the Installer's advanced options to install only the language(s) you actually use. Keep in mind that after updating, you still want to keep several GB free space on the HD to permit creation of the temporary disc files used in CD and DVD burning.
Also, check out Gulliver - Tiger Upgrade Guide

Free space on boot drive constantly decreases until reboot

Hi there. I have a really weird thing happening that I've never seen before.
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What the heck?

Your problem is excessive swapping of data between physical memory and virtual memory.
That can happen for two reasons:
(1) You have a long-running process with a memory leak (i.e., a bug), or
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Tracking down a memory leak can be difficult, and it may come down to a process of elimination. In Activity Monitor, select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected. Click the heading of the Real Mem column in the process table once or twice to sort the table with the highest value at the top. If one process (not including "kernel_task") is using much more memory than all the others, that could be an indication of a leak. A better indication would be a process that continually grabs more and more memory over time without ever releasing it.
This suggestion is only for users familiar with the shell. For a more precise, but potentially misleading, test, run the following command:
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Memory Usage Performance Guidelines: About the Virtual Memory System
If you don't have an obvious memory leak, your options are to install more memory (if possible) or to run fewer programs simultaneously.

Difference in reporting free space on my drive

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