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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Satellite L350 - how to use free space on hard drive?

Hi
Wonder if anyone can help please?
We have a Toshiba Satallite L350 with 500gb of HD. Over the past few weeks the laptop has been getting very sluggish ( carried out de frag etc which helped ) however, today I tried to add something to my laptop and was told we have no spare disc space!!!
On looking at the computer it appears I have 2 drives ( C & D ) and the C drive is almost full yet the D drive is nearly empty!! No matter what I try I am unable to transfer anything over to the D drive so it is 'sat there' doing nothing!!! All that is showing on here is the HDD recovery from intiial setup. I never even realised that the 2 drives were there, asuming the 500gb will be used when you need it!
Can someone give me an idea on how / what I need to do to make use of this extra 250gb of HD and enable me to use the laptop to it's full potential?
Many thanks
Mark / Hereford / UK

Hi
First of all the second partition (D) contains the recovery files and this is needed to create a recovery disk and to recover the notebook using HDD recovery option.
But this should be explained in user manual.
However, I dont see any reason why you should not be able to move some files like mp3, videos, or pictures to the D partition. This should be possible.
Of course its not possible to move an installed programs if you have installed such program on C partition.
In such case you would need to uninstall such software and would need to install it again on D partition.
Nevertheless you could also increase the volume of C partition by shrinking the D partition and adding the free space to C.
To do that, you need some 3rd party partitions software.
I could recommend you usage of Gparted software. its freeware and can be downloaded from internet. Google for that.
Additionally you could clean the system to get rid of some temporal stored files.
CCleaner is a good freeware tool which cleans the system.

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 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!

How do you free space on the startup disk

how do you free space on the startup disk

If your disk is 80% full that is normal. Time Machine uses up to 80% of the disk space for local snapshots. To get rid of these snapshots simply plug in your Time Machine backup drive and run a backup.
If you have less than 20% disk space then it is time to roll up your sleeves and search for what you can delete and what you can offload to another disk.
If you have less than 10 GB you definitely need to delete or offload some files. You may want to maintain at least 20 GB of free space so when your disk starts filling again it will have some room before it hits that 10 GB mark again. More headroom is better. If you let the space fall much below 9 GB you might not be able to boot your machine.
Initial easy steps to gain disk space:
- Delete all files in the Downloads folder.
- Empty the trash.
- Start iPhoto, empty its trash and restart the computer.
Deleting files:
Run a Time Machine (or other) backup since you are about to delete and move files and you may need to recover from any inadvertent mistakes or decisions. You will need one external hard drive for your Time Machine (or other) backup and a second one onto which you will offload some files.
Then use the free application OmniDiskSweeper http://www.omnigroup.com/more to explore your volume in descending order by size so you can attack the problem from the top down, deleting the largest unwanted files first. Delete with caution and do not delete any system files. Remember to empty the trash after trashing the files.
Moving files:
Consider moving some of the no-often-used large files or directories to an external disk. Use ODS again to find them.
As noted above this will be at least your second hard drive. Your first one(s) is/are for your Time Machine (or other) backup(s). Do not offload files onto a Time Machine disk.
Format the second drive as Mac OS Extended (journaled). Using OWS to find large files/folders and copy them from the system drive to the external hard drive and delete them from your internal drive.
Then  > System Preferences > Time Machine > Options… > Remove the offload HD name from the exclusions list.
Now both your system disk and your external offload disk will be backed up onto your Time Machine disk.
For more about backups:
Time Machine Basics: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427
Most commonly used backup methods:
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3045
Methodology to protect your data. Backups vs. Archives. Long-term data protection:
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6031
From: http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/freeingspace.html
To move your iTunes Music folder to another disk or partition:
To change the location of your iTunes Music folder, carefully follow the instructions in the AppleCare® Knowledge Base document "iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Music folder."Additional information can be found in iTunes Help.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.thexlab.com/105/ 00000849.html
Laptop users may want to consider having two iTunes libraries: a small library of current favorites on their computer, while their complete library resides on an external hard drive. Utilities like iTunes Library Manager enable you to easily have multiple iTunes libraries you can use with your account. https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/7689/itunes-library-manager
To move your iPhoto Library folder to another disk or partition:
To move the iPhoto Library folder to a new location, employ the instructions in the AppleCare Knowledge Base document from http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2506 corresponding to the version of iPhoto you are using. Additional information can be found in iPhoto Help.
Laptop users may want to consider having two iPhoto libraries: a small library of current, favorite photographs on their computer, while their complete library, or archives of older photos are saved on an external hard drive. Utilities such as iPhoto Buddy and iPhoto Library Managerenable you to have multiple iPhoto libraries that you can use with your account.
https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/12175/iphoto-buddy
https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/7158/iphoto-library-manager

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.

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?
Thanks,

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/>

How SMON coalesces free space in oracle 9i and 10g

how SMON coalesces free space in oracle 9i and 10g?
Is it doing same as it was behaving in oracle 7 like looking through free extent table every five minutes (sys.fet$) to see if there are any adjacent free extents that can be coalesced into a single extent, and on every 25th cycle (i.e. every two hours and five minutes) it looks at the segment table (sys.seg$) to see if there are any temporary segments that need to be eliminated, as explained by jonathan lewis?
what are extent and segment tables available in oracle 9i and 10g like sys.fet$ and sys.seg$ in oracle7?

>
how SMON coalesces free space in oracle 9i and 10g?
Is it doing same as it was behaving in oracle 7 like looking through free extent table every five minutes (sys.fet$) to see if there are any
adjacent free extents that can be coalesced into a single extent, and on every 25th cycle (i.e. every two hours and five minutes) it looks
at the segment table (sys.seg$) to see if there are any temporary segments that need to be eliminated, as explained by jonathan lewis?
what are extent and segment tables available in oracle 9i and 10g like sys.fet$ and sys.seg$ in oracle7?I think you need to go and have a look at the Oracle 9i documentation here
http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/oracle9i_arch_901.html
and automatic segment management in 10g
http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/10gdba/week15_10gdba.html
HTH.
Paul...
Software - OS (+ version), Server,
Hardware - CPU + Disk configuration.
Please include all of the above information with database queries.
This will help those who are trying to help you!
Furthermore, please do not top-post and do try to trim your replies!

HT1222 How do I free space in my phones memory to down load new os

How do I free space in my phones memory to down load new os

Most with iPhone4 have not been able to delete enough stuff in order to download iOS7 over-the-air. The easiest thing for you to do is do the update via iTunes.

How do I free space on my computer?

How do I free space on my computer?

Hello,
Let's see if we can find out where the big users of space are first.
How much free space is on the HD, where has all the space gone?
OmniDiskSweeper is likely the easiest/best, and is now free...
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/download/

Need to format "free space" of external hard drive for Time Machine

I just recently purchased a MacBook Air and want to set up Time Machine with my external hard drive. I'm migrating from Windows 7 so before purchasing my new Mac, I transferred about 100 GB of data from my PC to my external hard drive that I wanted to keep. The external hard drive has a partition of 100 GB (91 GB used) and 365 GB of "free space". I would like to know how to format that free space so that I can use it with Time Machine but at the same time not lose any of my data on the first partition. I've looked around in the Disk Utility but it doesn't give any options to format the free space.
Thanks in advance for any help.

You should be able to repartition it, but that requires that the HD was formatted with Mac OS X Extended and journaling turned on. All I can suggest is you get another HD or move the 100 GB of stuff to the MBA, erase, reformat, and partition into two pieces, copy the 100 GB stuff back to the HD, and then it's set for TM.

How do I free space on my hard drive in Mountain Lion?

How can I free up valuable space on my start up disk a/o hard drive space. I use FCPX a lot and I think there are many temporary files that I could easily get rid of within finder. I did this once with AppleCare's but as you know using Pro applications cost $100 per incident to get help using AppleCare. Please help me. Many thanks! My specs are as follows:
                3.5 GHz i7,
               16bg DDR3,
               AMD Radeon HD 6970M with 2GB of Video,
                OSX 10.8.4,
               2 TB hard drive with only 10.56 gb free.

Hard drive getting full or near full?
Do a search for and downlaod and install OmniDisk Sweeper and OnyX.
Here are some of my tips for deleting or archiving data off of your internal hard
Have you emptied your iMac's Trash icon in the Dock?
If you use iPhoto, iPhoto has its own trash that needs to be emptied, also.
If you use Apple Mail app, Apple Mail also has its own trash area that needs to be emptied, too!
Other things you can do to gain space.
Delete any old or no longer needed emails and/or archive older emails you want to save to disc, Flash drive/s or to ext. hard drive.
Look through your Documents folder and delete any type of old useless type files like "Read Me" type files.
Again, archive to disc, Flash drive or ext. hard drive and/or delete any old documents you no longer use or immediately need.
Uninstall apps that you no longer use. If the app has a dedicated uninstaller, use it to completely uninstall the app. If the app has no uninstaller, then just drag it to the OS X Trash icon and empty the Trash.
Also, if you save old downloaded .dmg application installer files, you can either archive and delete these or just delete the ones you think you'll never install, again.
Download an app called OnyX for your version of OS X.
When you install and launch it, let it do its thing initially, then go to the cleaning and maintenance tabs and run all of the processes in the tabs. Let OnyX clean out all web browser cache files, web browser histories, system cache files, delete old error log files.
Typically, iTunes and iPhoto libraries are the biggest users of HD space.
If you have any other large folders of personal data or projects, these should be thinned out, moved, also, to the external hard drive and then either archived to disc, Flash drive or ext. hard drive and/or deleted off your internal hard drive.
Good Luck!

Free space in external drive when trash is empty

I had a big folder in my external hard disk (60 Gb) I sent it to the trash and then I empty the trash but the space the file occupied is still ocuppied in the drive. How do I free up the space in my external drive? I know it should be free but somehow emptying the trash didn't worked. Help!

This issue happens to me to on ALL my Macs. For example if I have a flash drive that is 1024 MB and I put on 9 files that are 100 MB the used space is of course 900 MB. But, if I delete one of them then the use space does not go down to 800 MB it stays at 900 MB. You can empty trash and free up used space and it never shows it available again.
I have tried all the Partition Schemes on the flash drives and hard drives I own. (All the drive are different manufactures.) I have tried different formats and it's still the same. I have used a New MacBook, New MacBook Pro, New iMac and they all do the same dang thing!!! I even used an old G4 eMac and same thing!
It's defiantly an OS issue.
So what's up anyone have a REAL fix for this? I am tried of having to take data off of an external drive store it in a folder, then format the external then add my data back. It's getting to be freaking ridiculous.
My poodunk Windows doesn't do that!
OH FYI, A good fact to note if I use a drive partitioned as Partition Scheme MBR and Format FAT32 (so both OS can use it). The drive of course will work just fine on the Windows I can free up space and reuse space. But, when I put it in the Mac I will free up space and it won't be recognized anymore same issue, however if I put it back into my Windows the Windows NO LONGER sees the space I tried to free up with my Mac. I can continue to work with the space I have left, but the Mac has completely removed those blocks of data from being used again until I reformat the drive. Is that ODD?!
Now don't confuse that last paragraph and think it only happen on MDR or FAT32 Cuz it happens on all partition schemes and formats as I mentioned above. I just thought it was interesting that Mac effects the drive to where the other OS can't read that data anymore either.
Please help!
Message was edited by: theelysium

How to handle free space fragmentation index 30

hi
i need help with tablespaces that have free space fragmentation index lower than 30%..
how will i be able to increase the value to best at 100..
any suggestions?
thanks.

jjwhtn wrote:
Ok, resizing the boot camp partition failed, but being unable to delete it and resize the os x partition is weird, and I'm thinking there must be a way to get that free space back into that partition. That is the current issue.
If you don't believe me when I said you have to erase and format your drive then reinstall OSX, search this forum. Your issue has been addressed dozens or hundreds of times.

How to format "free space" on a drive?

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