Finder says Home Disk is full, utilities say I've only used 93Gb of 232Gb

Question

Earlier this evening I all of a sudden got an alert that my disk was full, 232Gb. 0Gb remaining.
It said I needed to renove some files. I tried. I removed about 10 Gb, but it didn't give me any more space.
I booted from my Clone to to see if I could run dik utility repair. It came up saying the disk was fine.
Repaired Permissions. Everything came up OK there too.
I ran Disk Warrior from it;s disk and it came up stating that I was only using 93Gb of 232Gb. (Which is what I remembered and was about how much my recent Carbon Copy Clone added up to)
I tried WhatSize and it said the same. I'm currently waiting for a license for Tager Cache Cleaner to see if it will help. None of the utilities is finding any hidden large files.
I've also tried backing up the mail folder and removing Envelope Index, but, of course, that made Mail crash since it's being told there's no room on the hard drive. I'm totally stumped.
I imagine there's some corrupt file somewhere, but I'm not getting a fix on it.
Recent changes to the drive - I upgraded to 10.4.9 a few ays ago. Had to install a third party driver for my HP PSC 2175 - hpijs-foomatic-2.0.2.
Printer stopped working earlier today and I had to reinstall CUPS and then the driver again before printer would work. Sortly thereafter that I got the error message about disk full.
System info:
Machine Name: Power Mac G5
Number Of CPUs: 1
CPU Speed: 1.6 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 512 KB
Memory: 2 GB
Bus Speed: 800 MHz
Boot ROM Version: 5.1.5f2
I have several different firewire drives attached as well as a USB "jump" drive.
Any advice would be most appreciated.
G5 1.6Gz   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Answer 1

I just found this discussion at the MacFixIt forums. You might read it carefully, and also take a look at the MacOSXHints article mentioned:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070319143243249
I have a batch of those job history files as well so thought I would try removing them and see what happened. I first got myself a root shell:
NoobiX:~ francine$ sudo -s
Hit return and entered my password, hit return again, then changed directory:
NoobiX:~ root# cd /private/var/spool/cups
Hit return and ran a list command:
NoobiX:/private/var/spool/cups root# ls -al
total 304
drwx--x--- 41 root lp 1394 Mar 26 21:59 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 root wheel 238 Aug 3 2006 ..
-rw------- 1 root lp 3571 Aug 24 2006 c00001
-rw------- 1 root lp 3574 Aug 24 2006 c00002
-rw------- 1 root lp 3505 Dec 8 00:24 c00003
....and so on.... down to
-rw------- 1 root lp 3531 Mar 26 21:59 c00038
drwxrwx--T 2 root lp 68 Dec 21 22:37 tmp
Which verified I was in the right place. I tried removing just one of the files:
NoobiX:/private/var/spool/cups root# rm c00001
which worked fine. I then decided doing this would be tedious, so tried this:
NoobiX:/private/var/spool/cups root# rm -r *
There is a space between the rm and -r and after -r before the * (a wildcard). That was probably a mistake since it not only nuked the history files but also the tmp directory. I should have probably used something like rm -r "c*" (since all the history files begin with c that should have got them and spared the tmp folder). I tried recreating the tmp folder with this:
NoobiX:/private/var/spool/cups root# mkdir tmp
Which seemed to work:
NoobiX:/private/var/spool/cups root# ls -al
total 0
drwx--x--- 3 root lp 102 Jun 7 12:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 root wheel 238 Aug 3 2006 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root lp 68 Jun 7 12:00 tmp
But being a suspicious sort I ran Disk Utility to Repair Permissions and it did indeed report an error on the /private/var/spool/cups/tmp folder, but it did repair the permissions on the folder successfully, so I'm assuming all is now OK. Of course, I haven't actually tried printing anything yet...
If you choose to try this after you finish type exit and hit return to kill the root shell, then quit Terminal.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder