Disk utilities reports different hard drive space

I have a MacBook Pro early 2011 that's acting up.When I repair the disk from disk utilities (separate drive and from recovery drive) it states that I have 100 GB available. However, if I click on the first "Macintosh HD" that shows up in disk utilities it says I only have18 mb available. How can that be? (Capacity 748 GB). I thought if I repair the nested version it would do the trick. But, repairing the "main" drive shows this discrepancy. Anybody have any ideas?
Helga

The larger value is correct. The smaller one refers to the Core Storage logical volume group, not the startup volume.

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Somehow I lost Disk Utilities on my hard drive (OSX10.9.5) how do I get another copy

Somehow I lost Disk Utilities on my hard drive, Ive searched and it just doesn't exist anywhere. (OSX10.9.5) how do I get another copy?

Thanks Neil. No, of course there was no backup to restore from, but the Command + R worked like a charm (after a mirror backup, just in case) .
I had totally forgotten the Command R trick. I've only had Macs since 1984, so I'm sort of newbie here ;-) Just a brain **** from an old man.
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ch2co

Unable to delete a disk image and reclaim hard drive space.

I created a disk image on which to store some stuff, and I now want to get rid of the disk image (which is 115 gigs of storage) and reclaim the hard drive space. I'm running Mac OS X 10.8.3. I have been unable to delete it through disk utility. I can only unmount it or mount it, but the storage space remains with it. I can't get rid of it through the downloads folder either, but if I find it in "volumes" via spotlight, and try to put it in the trash, it tells me "ENN.dmg cannot be thrown away because it can't be deleted." I tried using root user to delete the item and it told me I could not because it belongs to another person. My permissions are "read and write." I've searched all sorts of forums. Can anyone help? Thanks!

What error are you getting? Are you dragging and dropping on the trash can or right clicking and selecting "Move to Trash"?
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Mac and Windows showing different hard drive space remaining?

Hello Guys,
I am using my 1tb hard drive with mac and windows and while checking the space remaining, my mac says roughly 600gb left and my windows comp. says about 500gb left. I am just wondering which one of the storage remaining statements is correct and why they both show different numbers (by 100gb)? If it helps, this also happens to my 16gb flash drive. mac says 10 gb left, and windows says less space left (dont remember actual number, but was roughly 6-8).
Just asking becuase I want to know why such a big difference in size remaining. Could it have to do with the way each OS sees what defines the harddrive as full?
if it matters, my hdd format is MS-DOS (FAT32).
Thanks a lot,
krm1897

haha its been 2 years. And no, i didn't figure it out, but i speculate it may have to do how Mac OSX and Windows reads the FAT file system (my tb hdd was FAT formatted so i could use it on both OS) and calculates remaining space.
That may be right, or it may be completely wrong lol
krm1897

Disk utility reports smaller hard drive size than actual

I have been using a 3tb external drive (Formatted mac osx journaled) without any problems on my mac mini. Suddenly, it no longer allows me to write to the drive and more often it does not even recognize the drive when it is in the caddy. The caddy supports USB3 and is fairly new. The hard drive is a 7200rpm seagate.
When looking at the drive in disk utility, it states that the drive is 2.2 TB while the size is 3TB.
Does anyone have similar problems? Any recommendations?
Currently on OS X version 10.8.5.
Thanks!
When I insert the drive in the caddy I get the error message that it is not readable. Disk utility reports it as 2.2tb. The drive is a 3TB Seagate.

Hi Eric,
Can't really hook it up directly to a mac mini as the mini is pretty sealed. I did connect it to a PC as I wanted to run SpinRite on it and SpinRite gave me an error message that the Drive Size reported was less than the actual physical drive size.
SpinRite recommended not to perform any actions on the drive due to this discrepancy.
Not sure where to go at this point.
I could try to re-format the 3TB with OS X Journal and see if I get the 3tb back...

Disk utility reports failing hard drive with error code STF/8/3:2 ATA BUS 0

My imac G5 (running Tiger) suddenly decided not to boot past the grey apple screen with the spinning wheel. I ran the disk utility and received error code STF/8/3:2 ATA BUS 0 MASTER on the mass storage test. I tried to run repair and only received a message "fatal hard drive error etc... back up, recover asap... I could not access the disk so I connected my new MacBook Pro by firewire in target disk mode. My HD shows up however, "nothing" shows up under when my "user" file. All I care about saving is my iphoto library. Everything else is trivial. Can someone Please help me? Is there any way I will be able to save this file?
Message was edited by: Elizabeth Burson

Welcome to Discussions - you can try DiskWarrior and see if it can retrieve some of your data. You can also take it in to Apple with an external fire wire drive you have purchased elsewhere (cheaper) and see if they can transfer the data. You can then install the external into your computer.

I have a mid-2010 27" Quad Core i5 iMac running 10.8.3. Startup disk recognizes the primary hard drive as a startup volume but will not boot from it. Have tried zapping PRAM, ran disk utility. No errors reported Any thoughts?

I have a mid-2010 27" Quad Core i5 iMac running 10.8.3. Startup disk recognizes the primary hard drive as a startup volume but will not boot from it. Have tried zapping PRAM, ran disk utility. No errors reported Any thoughts?

My bad Eric. The startup preference recognizes the primary as a 10.8.3 startup volume but when u select it the system does not boot. I can only boot from my external backup drive

T510 Recovery Disk on different hard drive

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CrazyTn wrote:
I also bought 4 gig of faster ram. But when I open up the back there is only one slot of ram. Is it possible to upgrade both slot?
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The other slot is under the keyboard. You have to remove the keyboard to access it. I'm not 100% sure of the process since I've never had to remove mine, but I seem to recall that you flip the laptop upside down and remove two screws, then you flip it back up and kind of push on the bottom edge of the keyboard a bit and it will sort of pop out. Once it's out you should be able to access the extra RAM slot.
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Missing Large Chunk of Hard Drive Space - Pavilion Dv4t

Hi All,
I purchased a Pavillion Dv4t about a month ago with a 320 gb hard drive. Upon first inspection, I noticed that the drive partitions, when added together, fell way short of 320gb. The C drive plus Recovery drive = 298 gb! I initially wondered if the missing space was a hidden partition containing vista, and that when I custom installed windows 7, I would be able to formatt that part of the drive to install 7. This does not appear to be the case as the install upgrade only showed the 2 partitions totaling 298gigs.
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Also, I've run a hdd diagnodtic test wich showed no drive issues.
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Capacity measurements
A disassembled and labeled 1997 hard drive. All major components were placed on a mirror, which created the symmetrical reflections.
Raw unformatted capacity of a hard disk drive is usually quoted with SI prefixes (metric system prefixes), incrementing by powers of 1000; today that usually means gigabytes (GB) and terabytes (TB). This is conventional for data speeds and memory sizes which are not inherently manufactured in power of two sizes, as RAM and Flash memory are. Hard disks by contrast have no inherent binary size as capacity is determined by number of heads, tracks and sectors.
This can cause some confusion because some operating systems may report the formatted capacity of a hard drive using binary prefix units which increment by powers of 1024.
A one terabyte (1 TB) disk drive would be expected to hold around 1 trillion bytes (1,000,000,000,000) or 1000 GB; and indeed most 1 TB hard drives will contain slightly more than this number. However some operating system utilities would report this as around 931 GB or 953,674 MB, whereas the correct units would be 931 GiB or 953,674 MiB. (The actual number for a formatted capacity will be somewhat smaller still, depending on the file system). Following are the correct ways of reporting one Terabyte.
SI prefixes (Hard Drive) equivalent Binary prefixes (OS) equivalent
1 TB (Terabytes) 1 * 10004 B 0.9095 TiB (Tebibytes) 0.9095 * 10244 B
1000 GB (Gigabytes) 1000 * 10003 B 931.3 GiB (Gibibytes) 931.3 * 10243 B
1,000,000 MB (Megabytes) 1,000,000 * 10002 B 953,674.3 MiB (Mebibytes) 953,674.2 * 10242 B
1,000,000,000 KB (Kilobytes) 1,000,000,000 * 1000 B 976,562,500 KiB (Kibibytes) 976,562,500 * 1024 B
1,000,000,000,000 B (bytes) - 1,000,000,000,000 B (bytes) -
Microsoft Windows reports disk capacity both in a decimal integer to 12 or more digits and in binary prefix units to three significant digits.
The capacity of an HDD can be calculated by multiplying the number of cylinders by the number of heads by the number of sectors by the number of bytes/sector (most commonly 512). Drives with the ATA interface and a capacity of eight gigabytes or more behave as if they were structured into 16383 cylinders, 16 heads, and 63 sectors, for compatibility with older operating systems. Unlike in the 1980s, the cylinder, head, sector (C/H/S) counts reported to the CPU by a modern ATA drive are no longer actual physical parameters since the reported numbers are constrained by historic operating-system interfaces and with zone bit recording the actual number of sectors varies by zone. Disks with SCSI interface address each sector with a unique integer number; the operating system remains ignorant of their head or cylinder count.
The old C/H/S scheme has been replaced by logical block addressing. In some cases, to try to "force-fit" the C/H/S scheme to large-capacity drives, the number of heads was given as 64, although no modern drive has anywhere near 32 platters.
[edit] Formatted disk overhead
For a formatted drive, the operating system's file system internal usage is another, although minor, reason why a computer hard drive or storage device's capacity may show its capacity as different from its theoretical capacity. This would include storage for, as examples, a file allocation table (FAT) or inodes, as well as other other operating system data structures. This file system overhead is usually less than 1% on drives larger than 100 MB. For RAID drives, data integrity and fault-tolerance requirements also reduce the realized capacity. For example, a RAID1 drive will be about half the total capacity as a result of data mirroring. For RAID5 drives with x drives you would lose 1/x of your space to parity. RAID drives are multiple drives that appear to be one drive to the user, but provides some fault-tolerance.
A general rule of thumb to quickly convert the manufacturer's hard disk capacity to the standard Microsoft Windows formatted capacity is 0.93*capacity of HDD from manufacturer for HDDs less than a terabyte and 0.91*capacity of HDD from manufacturer for HDDs equal to or greater than 1 terabyte.
click Kudos to say thanks if I helped

Disappearing Hard Drive Space After Yosemite Update

After installing OS X Yosemite my hard drive space has dwindled to basically nothing, rendering my computer useless. I had at least 50 gb (maybe more) of hard drive space before updating from mavericks to yosemite. Now, after using my computer for 30 mins or less I get an error message saying that my storage space is low. After a restart I will get about 600 mb of storage but then the cycle repeats. Since I have upgraded to Yosemite I have not saved or downloaded any large files but there is a significant amount of storage space (104 gb) used in the other category. It is not consistent with my usage. I initially had file vault encryption turned on but I thought maybe that was the cause of my disappearing hard drive space so I turned file encryption off and still no luck.
Please Help!
Problem description:
Hard drive space disappearing after installing OS X Yosemite.
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You are too low on drive space for iDVD to run properly. It is recommended that you try to have about 15-20 GB free for the application to run. See if you can delete anything to free up more space. Or, move more of your files to your external drive. iDVD needs to be on your computer's drive, so don't move it, or any of the iLife applications to your external drive.
You can create iMovies on an external drive, move your entire iPhoto and iTunes libraries to external drives, but I find iDVD works better if I create its projects on my main drive. I save all of my iDVD projects as disk image files and then move those files to my external drive for saving my projects. This allows me to delete the original iDVD project and the original iMovie project used in it, which gives more free space on my drives.

Best way to free up hard drive space??

Brand new here-please take it easy on me!!
I backed up my hard drive to an external seagate freeagent pro (360GB??), but when I go to the seagate drive, I cannot view my photos that were backed up. How do I view them? I opened the seagate icon, clicked on applications folder, scrolled down to iphoto (which is under the installers tab-should it be under the installers tab or utilities tab??) open iphoto, but it shows no photos......?
I have over 10,000 photos that are VERY important to me, and would not like to lose them.
I read that it is okay to move the library to the trash to free up hard drive space?? Could someone direct me to a link to help me out? I have been searching for about 2 hours and haven't found my answer yet......I'm starting to get a little nervous.......

do not do anything with the Library folders, especially the Library in your user home folder - most of your music, photos etc are stored there by default.
in Mac OS X every user has an account and a home folder, contents of which are linked to the applications (iPhoto etc) for each different user; if you simply copy the files over to another drive, the links may not work.
if everything still works on the original drive, you may want to "clone" the drive to the external - it will make an exact copy of your drive.
to clone, boot from the installation DVD, go to the Disk Utility and use "Restore" option to clone the drive - be very careful about which drive is the source and which one is the destination, since the destination drive will be erased.
try at your own risk though.

Lack of hard drive space overnight and oddity at login prompt.

I have recently seen something weird on my iMac. At the login prompt my computer reads: "My Computer (2)" it never did previously. Then when I checked my hard drive space it was at 110 GB available, it now is 50 GB available. What is this issue? Is the whole hard drive copied or something weird. It is also very slow with Adobe CS4 and this was never an issue.

HI and Welcome to Apple Discussions...
Boot from your Mac install disc and run Disk Utility in case the startup disk needs repairs.
Insert your install disk and Restart, holding down the "C" key until grey Apple appears.
Go to Installer menu and launch Disk Utility.
Select your HDD (manufacturer ID) in the left panel.
Select First Aid in the Main panel.
*(Check S.M.A.R.T Status of HDD at the bottom of right panel. It should say: Verified)*
Click Repair Disk on the bottom right.
If DU reports disk does not need repairs quit DU and restart.
If DU reports errors Repair again and again until DU reports disk is repaired.
When you are finished with DU, from the Menu Bar, select Utilities/Startup Manager.
Select your start up disk and click Restart
While you have the Disk Utility window open, look at the bottom of the window. Where you see Capacity and Available. *Make sure there is always 10% to 15% free disk space*
If you cannot boot from your install disc, try booting in Safe Mode
What is Safe Mode
Carolyn
Message was edited by: Carolyn Samit

Freeing up hard drive space

I am trying to figure out how to free up space on the mac hard drive. If my iTunes library is backed up to an external hard drive, can I delete the library from the mac hard drive? How would I re-map iTunes so it launches from the external drive?
Next question: I store all of my photos on 2 external drives, but does the mac store a copy of the photos as I am editing them in Photoshop? Would love to understand how to clean this up, as I am down to less than 1GB of space on the mac.

How would I re-map iTunes so it launches from the external drive?
Hold down the option key while starting iTunes. Select the different library. Note, your external drive will have to be on when starting itunes in the future or else it will make an empty library on your drive.
Next question: I store all of my photos on 2 external drives, but does the mac store a copy of the photos as I am editing them in Photoshop? Would love to understand how to clean this up, as I am down to less than 1GB of space on the mac.
I don't use Photoshop but it isn't unusual for applications to make temporary buffers when editing files. I don't know if you can or would want to disable that.
1GB is seriously low. You should probably have 15+ GB free.
[Problems from insufficient RAM and free hard disk space|http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/lackofram.html]
*Reading on hard drive space issues*
[Erasing free space results in erroneous full disk warning|http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=459623&seqNum=9]
[Where did my disk space go?|http://www.macfixitforums.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=Forum38&Number=770243 ]
[X-Lab: Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk|http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/freeingspace.html]
[Amazing Disappearing Drive Space|http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/TigerMisc.html]
[Increase HD Free Space|http://macosx.com/forums/howto-faqs/275191-how-easily-increase-hd free-space-laptop.html]
[How to free up my disk space|http://www.macmaps.com/diskfull.html]
[Baby Boomer's Apple Discussions post|http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10189607#10189607]
*Utilities for investigating drive space usage*
[Disk Inventory (free)|http://www.derlien.com>
[OmniDiskSweeper (free)|http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/download>
[WhatSize|http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize> (now shareware and only useful on <20GB drives until you buy it)
[GrandPerspective|http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net>

Recovering Hard Drive Space?

Hi all,
I was wondering if there's a way to recover hard drive space after emptying the trash?
My macbook tells me that I have 1.39Gb of free space, so I went around deleting some videos, and then empty the trash.
However, I checked how much free space I have left, it's still 1.39Gb after emptying the trash, and I'm sure I've deleted around 10Gb worth of videos.
However, I notice that if I log out and then log back in, I get the space back.
I was wondering if I could recover the hard drive space without actually logging out.
Thanks in advance~

Operating with such a small amount of free space is quite dangerous and can result in directory corruption. I recommend you start be repairing your hard drive and permissions:
Repairing the Hard Drive and Permissions
Boot from your OS X Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger and Leopard.) After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer. Now restart normally.
If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior (4.0 for Tiger, and 4.1 for Leopard) and/or TechTool Pro (4.6.1 for Leopard) to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.
Normally you need at least 10 GBs or 15% of the hard drive's capacity as free space whichever is greater. Too little free space is hazardous to your hard drive's health and will cause OS X to run slower. If you are running out of space then you need a larger hard drive.

Where's my missing hard drive space?

I posted earlier about this, it may be a bit off topic but if anyone can offer a clue, I would appreciate it.
I got my win 7 upgrade and was waiting until vista started giving me headaches or the win7 service pack1 came out to upgrade...vista got me to upgrade today and I have to admit it was much less painful than i anticipated.
My question is about the missing hard drive space on my Idea center K230 on the box and on the side of the comp it claims a 640 HD (it claims in small print that up to 18gb may be used for the service partition) I questioned this when i first got it and even after deleting all the preloaded crap it was still saying 540 available out of 580GB....then I read that Lenovo has a huge partition for backup. So when I do my upgrade to win 7- 64 bit, I do a clean install and delete the smaller partition and reformat and expand the larger but before installing the new OS it says I have 596 available, so where the hell is the other 44GB of hard drive...did Lenovo rip us off and put 600GB hard drives in the K230's or is there a hidden partition still left that I cant find?
I am running everything off of my 596GB C: drive, I have my virus stuff and video card extras loaded, everything from the upgrade and 21 available patches and new drivers for most of my stuff....right now I am at at 575gb available and if i can ever find a printer driver that works I will create a backup point or disc from there, whatever win 7 allows. I never wanted the Lenovo one button back up and thought it was stupid to put a big glowing button on the keyboard that wipes your system back to when it came out of the box...I had nightmares of someone getting curious and going "what does this button do?"
.I notice I have a program files folder and a program files (x86) folder with a bunch of redundant files. what's the deal with this is Lenovo still hiding a backup program (maybe in that hidden partition?) that fills my hard drive twice as fast or is there a purpose for the file copies?
Any info on the above questions would be appreciated, and for those of you just looking for upgrade info I have good news, when you finally get your win7 upgrade disc it is the easiest windows installation ever, almost copmpletely automated, and very fast. So far the only sticking point is finding a printer driver, but I have 3 printers i can try, maybe one is supported.

Hi wise2u!
You can read all the details about how storage manufacturers use multiples of 1000 to measure disk space, and Windows reports it in multiples of 1024, and there is some overhead for Windows, or you can just use this rule of thumb from wikipedia:
A general rule of thumb to quickly convert the manufacturer's hard disk capacity to the standard Microsoft Windows formatted capacity is 0.93*capacity of HDD from manufacturer for HDDs less than a terabyte and 0.91*capacity of HDD from manufacturer for HDDs equal to or greater than 1 terabyte.
0.93 * 640GB = 595GB, which is about what you're seeing.
I don't work for Lenovo. I'm a crazy volunteer!

Disk utilities reports different hard drive space

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