External Hard drive shows no space after failed "Delete Free Space" from Disk Utility

2009 13" MBP running 10.6.8
I was clearing out a section of my external to clean it of a former client's information. The operation worked fine until it got to the "create temporary files" where it got hung for several hours. Forced quit D.U. and rebooted my machine. Now the external only shows 5MB when it should be closer to 150MB.
I have run the the following script in Terminal to show hidden files:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder
Not sure what files to delete.
Should I run:
sudo rm -f /var/root/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/*
Will this delete the temporary items in my external or only my HD?
Any tips would be greatly appreciated!

Fixed it! I downloaded WhatSize and found the temporary files. Deleted and retrieved all my space!

Similar Messages

  • Why won't my external hard drive show up anywhere? Something wrong abt NTFS.

    Why won't my external hard drive show up anywhere? Something wrong abt NTFS. After my OS turn to OS X Lion, this problem occur. I couldn't solve it, anybody?

    It doesn't make sense.
    Anyway, I found the solutions. Download software for solving this problem.
    Here is the link:
    http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24481/ntfs-3g

  • Every time I try to back up my Macbook Pro with an external hard drive using Time Machine, I receive the error of "the disk does not have enough space". I have a 500GB hard drive and only 120GB Macbook. It worked fine before the latest Maverick's

    Every time I try to back up my Macbook Pro with an external hard drive using Time Machine, I receive the error of "the disk does not have enough space". I have a 500GB external hard drive and only 120GB Macbook. It worked fine before the latest Maverick's update. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

    My guess would be it has created an entirely new backup of your drive when you upgraded to Mavericks.
    See Here: http://pondini.org/TM/1.html
    And here: http://pondini.org/TM/9.html
    Peruse the whole site. There is a lot of information there.

  • I just had to reformat the external hard drive that houses my iPhoto library, then restore it from a backup. Now Time Machine is telling me my backup hard drive suddenly does not have the space to complete a backup. I also noticed when I go in to Time Mac

    I just had to reformat the external hard drive that houses my iPhoto library, then restore it from a backup. Now Time Machine is telling me my backup hard drive suddenly does not have the space to complete a backup. I also noticed when I go in to Time Machine, there are only about 5 backups recorded on the ext. hard drive. There were many more before. Any idea what happened and if I have to buy a new back up hard drive?

    Hallo  Kieth ,
    I am not quite ready to restore the full iphoto library , as I have days of work re - imputting titles,descriptions and enhancement . I hope that your suggestion works , as I use my Macbook basically to work with digital photography. Through time , I will need to delete my library to recover more disc space and I would hate to have to spend more time re - imputting titles and descriptions all over again .
    Thanks for your interest and advice.
    regards  - Alan

  • Can I create a "new" iTunes library on an external hard drive and transfer my iTune library to save space on my laptop

    Can I create a "new" iTunes library on an external hard drive and transfer my iTune library to save space on my laptop hard drive

    Yes. Just copy all your music to a folder on your external. Then delete the music on your computers hard drive.
    It is not quite that simple. If you do that you will end up with many broken links and will have to re-create your library from scratch .  iTunes does not like it when you move or rename files or folders and doing so between drives is guaranteed to result in exclamation marks indicating you have broken the links to all your media files.
    If you are content with moving the whole library to an external drive (usually the best thing for most people), try:
    iTunes: How to move [or copy] your music to a new computer [or another drive] - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4527
    Quick answer if you use iTunes' default preferences settings:  Copy the entire iTunes folder (and in doing so all its subfolders and files) intact to the other drive.  Open iTunes and immediately hold down the Option (alt) key (shift on Windows), then guide it to the new location of the library.

  • If I move my iTunes content such as movies to an external hard drive will I be able to delete the content off my iTunes on my computer?

    I have a macbook air and I am having an issue with space.
    When I rent a movie most times I rather just buy it because its sometimes only a few extra dollors more but im having the space issue.
    If I transfer my itunes files to an external hard drive will I be able to delete the movies off my computer after so I dont have a 100% full hard drive, and if I delete the files off my itunes on my computer will I come to a problem when I plug in the external hard drive and go to watch them?
    please help!!
    thank you so much!

    If you have a router with a USB port (I have the AirPort Extreme with a USB port, for example) you can hook up just about any hard drive to it and have it recognized on the network. But first I would consider what you want your backup scheme(s) to actually do... personally, I use three backup schemes - I've two Time Machine drives to backup my internal drive, I've three clones of my internal drive, I've one clone of my Thunderbolt 2TB 'working' drive, and I regularly backup to dual-layer DVDs (not full backups, just archived material).
    So you need to use one or more backup schemes - at least two for your internal drives (Time Machine and a clone) and one for archival purposes. A Time Capsule would be perfect as a wireless Time Machine backup and you can purchase a small (well, at least the size of your internal drive) external drive to make a clone copy. Time Machine offers incremental backups (a plus when you want to go 'back in time' - at least to a time within the space limitations of your Time Capsule) while a clone gives you a 'snapshot' of your internal drive from the last time you cloned. Both have their advantages, which is why I suggest using both. For purely archival purposes, however, I use DVD - I've been doing this for over a decade now and haven't had one fail yet.
    So those are your basic options - a Time Capsule would work great for wireless Time Machine backups, but i would also keep a clone and use DVDs for archiving data.
    Good luck,
    Clinton

  • I have Lion on an external hard-drive and I want to install it on the internal disk

    I have Lion on an external hard-drive and I want to install it on the internal disk. How can I proceed?

    I recently completed a clean install of Lion on an internal SSD. After wiping it clean, I used a thumb drive with SL on it to boot and then another thumb drive with Lion on it. It worked just fine. The only thing to be aware of is that if you use the thumb to install Lion from... it will not install a recovery partition and you'll have to use the thumb in the future.
    That's what I wanted anyway so it's working out just fine. Good luck.
    I should add... I used the SL thumb to actually boot from and used Disk Utlities to wipe the internal SSD. It does work and there are Apple posts that can guide you through the thumb drive process. I used copycat to create both the SL boot and Lion.

  • Hey guys, how can i password protect my files in external hard drive? I want to access those files both from mac and windows PC!

    Hey guys, how can i password protect my files in external hard drive? I want to access those files both from mac and windows PC!

    If you want a cross-platform solution that doesn't require the use of third-party software, use an external drive with hardware encryption. The device will have either a physical key or a numeric keypad. I don't have a specific recommendation.

  • External hard drive is not recognized after attempt to format

    I just got a new macbook and couldn't use my external hard drive because it was formatted on a PC and only allowed me to read the data. I backed up the data on the 250gb hd and then used Disk Utility to erase the hd and format it as "Mac OS extended (journaled)." After beginning, Disk Utility stopped working and showed up as "not responding" in the Activity Monitor.
    Now the hd does not show up on the desktop and can only be seen in Disk Utility. If I try to erase again or partition the hd the utility stops responding. If I try to zero out the drive it continues to say "preparing to zero" indefinately. Now the hd is also not recognized by windows except in the windows disk utility, but it does not even give the option of formatting/initializing it, so that is not an option.
    Has anyone ever seen anything like this before, or have any idea of something that I haven't tried yet. I really want to get the drive working and have exhausted all the ideas I can come up with. The internet has not provided too many ideas either.
    Thanks so much for your help.
    Black MacBook   Mac OS X (10.4.6)  

    I have crazy solution to format it to FAT 32, it work a couple times on my several MAxtor, and Western Digital HD. But this is the last resort and if you are not handy and familiar, don't do it.
    It happen on my external HD, so I crack the enclosure open, pulled the HD out and attached it as internal HD on a PC after adjusting the jumper to master and make sure no other HD attached to the motherboard. Make sure the motherboard detected (you can see it from bios menu).
    Insert a bootable installer disk before XP ('98, ME, or 2000), and start from there until a promt comes, and type fdisk and you delete the old partition and create a new partition and restart once using the disk still and format it using FAT 32.
    After that you put it back to the enclosure, and mount it to MacBook as a new HD with default factory format.
    If you don't have the installer disk, this might help :
    http://www.bootdisk.com/
    But if your maxtor still under warranty better talk to them first and they might willing to reformat it for you.
    Hope this help your external back and let you use it on your MacBook.

  • External Hard Drive doesn't work after Time Machine cancelation

    First post on the forum.
    So far i've had 2 hard drives broken because of a simple Time Machine.
    I own a MBP and an HP so my hard drives usually have 2 partitions, one for mac, the other for pc. About a month or so i was doing a Time Machine on my Iomega 1TB (the partition used for the time machine is formatted in Mac Os Expanded (with journaling)),  and, because the time machine was extremely slow i stopped it. Then came the problems. I tried to connect the Iomega to the mac, but the partition in which i had the time machine doesn't mount. the other partition is mountable and i even managed to delete some files in it, so it worked. But now the partitions don't mount. I can still see the two partitions in Disk Utility, with the correct names i gave them, but cannot mount.
    Right now i don't have the disk with me because i went to a "professional" to try and at least recover my files. What a joke that was. First they told me they had my recovered files and them the files were not mine. The switched the disks and gave me someone elses files. And now they ask me for 1100$ to recover my files because it is a hardware malfunction. Obviously i dont have that amount of money available and i cannot afford the recovery atm, and i do not believe that a software can cause hardware to fail. (just guessing)
    Resume: 1 external hard drive, with 2 partitions, one mac os expanded and the other is a Windows NT Filesystem. None of the partitions are corrently mounting on mac but the disk utility recognizes the partitions and the names i gave them.
    So guys can u help a poor little girl that needs her photographies so that she can go and show her portfolio to get a job. :/
    Kinda desperate at this point.
    ps: sorry for bad english, second language

    One can't read the other.
    Just to be clear Mac's can read/write FAT32 but windows cannot use OS X Extended. So to use a drive on both systems it needs to be formatted FAT32
    FAT32 does have limitations and possibly the best solution is to use NTFS, a more modern, robust filesystem. The drawback here is that OS X does not natively read NTFS so a third party kernel extension is needed.

  • External hard drive is still full after deleting files

    I everyone, i really need some help with my hard drive. I have the Lacie 500gb firewire hard drive. I am save most of my short films, and other works on it while using final cut. While rendering videos recently , its said that i needed to free up space. When i right click and click on the get info for the hard drive, it told me 493.34gb has been used. I have deleted almost all the huge files i have on there after uploading to my cloud, but its making no difference. Its not freeing up any space. and I'm now at 497gb. Now i have almost totally deleted everything on it, and its still saying i have only about 2.7gb left on it.
    I really can't afford to go and get another hard drive right now and just need to free up some space on this hard drive to continue working.
    Please tell me what i am doing wrong so i can free up much necessary space on this drive.
    I anxiously await your assistance.
    thanks a whole lot!!

    Dig deep, because it sounds like your best solution is to actually get another External Hard Drive.
    I don't normally recommend inexpensive USB portable hard drives for everyday use, but that might be a good solution for old files that you would really rather save than trash to make room. 
    For example's:
    see > http://www.frys.com/product/7697397?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG
    and > http://www.frys.com/product/7332414?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

  • WD 400 GB external hard drive doesn't mount after software update.

    I had been using my WD external hard drive with TimeMachine for almost a year. Just recently the WD doesn't show up on desktop, however you can see it under the Apple's "System Profiler". Any suggestions?
    External HDD:
    Removable Media: No
    Detachable Drive: Yes
    BSD Name: disk1
    Version: 0.00
    Bus Power (mA): 500
    Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
    Manufacturer: Western Digital
    Mac OS 9 Drivers: No
    Partition Map Type: Unknown
    Product ID: 0x0900
    Serial Number: 57442********************938
    Vendor ID: 0x1058

    c14user,
    Looking back at your original post: "Partition Map Type: Unknown" is a little suspicious. I'm wondering if, while the disk was formatted correctly, perhaps the partition scheme was not changed from Master Boot Record when you first began using it. I made that discovering recently on a drive that I could no longer select as a Time Machine disk. If so you'll need to re-partition the disk either GUID or Apple Partition Map.
    *_How Should a Time Machine Hard Disk be Prepared?_*
    For Time Machine to work properly, the hard disk must be formatted “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” and its’ Partition Scheme should be either GUID or Apple Partition Map.
    Time Machine is incompatible with disks partitioned as Master Boot Record (MBR). Unfortunately, this describes nearly every hard drive you can buy because MBR is a Windows partition scheme. (Naturally, this DOES NOT apply to Apples’ Time Capsule.)
    For some, Time Machine begins to perform as expected with a new external hard disk. But then the initial full backup or subsequent incremental backups fail. The user only later discovers the hard disk was still partitioned as Master Boot Record (MBR).
    One article on Time Machine made this observation: “Virtually everybody will have to open Disk Utility and repartition the disk as APM or GUID. It doesn't really matter which one because the Time Machine disk will not be bootable anyway. APM allows a disk to boot a PowerPC, GUID allows the disk to boot an Intel processor but both are easily digestible by Time Machine on either kind of processor.” [http://www.girr.org/mac_stuff/backups.html]
    Procedure
    Connect the hard disk you wish to use for Time Machine backups.
    Launch Disk Utility.
    It will appear twice in the pane on the left. (Make sure you recognize that it is different from the 2 icons that represent your Macs' internal drive.) The upper entry represent the device as a whole, including the controller inside. The lower entry represents the hard disk contained within the device.
    Click on the upper icon of the external hard disk.
    Select the "Partition" tab.
    For "Volume Scheme" choose "1 partition". (Chose 2 partitions if you intend on storing other data on the disk besides your Time Machine backups.)
    Name the disk.
    Format should be "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)".
    Click "Options".
    Select either GUID or Apple Partition Map. (See above for significance)
    Click "OK".
    Click "Apply". Then click “Partition”.
    Once the external hard disk is repartitioned, select it again in Time Machine preferences and use it for your backups.
    Let us know if this was helpful.

  • How do I make my external hard drive show up in devices even when the external discs box is checked in preferences?

    External hard drive not showing up in devices, even after troubleshooting and checked in preferences.

    OK I solved my own problem. My iPhone was plugged into the other USB port in addition to the external hard drive. I took out the iPhone USB and switched the external hard drive USB to the other USB port. The drive showed up in my devices!

  • Why won't my external hard drive show up in the hard drive list in final cut pro x?

    I can't figure out how to get my external hard drive to show up in the list of available drives in final cut pro x. It works just fine in iMovie 11 and every where else on my MacBook pro. The external hard drive I am trying to get to appear is an iomega 1 TB hard drive. Please help as I have a ton of footage on it and don't have the room to move it to my internal drive on the MacBook.

    I have the same problem with internal drives. Only the one with the largest free space shows up. The others ”blink” in the Event viewer, and then disappear. Sounds like a bug...
    Regards,
    Rabbe

  • External hard drives won't mount after upgrading to Tiger 10.4.9. Help!

    Hi, I've just got the latest iMac. Very excited! I did all the software updates, connected my Western Digital extended hard drive so that I could copy some files over onto my new Mac. It was fine at first. Then when I wanted to open up the external hard drive icon on my desktop again and double clicked on it, everything disappeared from the screen for a few seconds, then reappeared but my external hard drive simply opened the window to my personal hard drive on the Mac. The WD links to my computer via Firewire. I then connected my USB external hard drive stick and it was the same story.
    I used Disk Utility to test everything and everything was fine.
    I then reinstalled Mac OSX 10.4.8 and plugged in my external hard drives. Everything worked perfectly. After copying over documents and a couple of programs, and downloading a few more programs, I ran my software updates again, upgrading the operating system to Tiger 10.4.9. I attached my external hard drive and it was the same problem all over again.
    I the read up the online discussions and also chatted to an Apple dealer, and their advice was to download the Intel Combo and reinstall the operating system. I have just done this and my external hard drives will still not mount properly. Their icons appear on screen but double click them and everything disappears.
    Please help. This is really frustrating as I have a backlog of work to do and I seem to be wasting hours on this. Not only that, this is a brand new machine which I rightly expect to work straight away.
    I look forward to your response. Thank you in advance.

    Hi, try to put your HDD in other Mac and look if appear the same, also you can try to repair permission.

Maybe you are looking for