IBook G4: disk is full, external hard drive?

I have had my iBook for a year and a half and only recently has it started to say that my disk is full. I have added only one application that wasn't on my computer since the beginning( i have deleted all the ones i dont use) and i have 232 songs, 76 television shows (on iTunes), 6 short documents including one large powerpoint, and one picture. I have deleted EVERYTHING i possibly could and my computer is on the verge of crashing! I've heard about getting an external hard drive but I don't know where or whick kind i should get.

slamminsammy:
A too full HDD is a serious condition which can lead to directory errors, loss of data and an eventual Hard Disk Drive crash. Here's what I suggest:
1. Make sure you have an up-to-date backup. An external Firewire HDD is a good move, You can use SuperDuper to clone your entire HDD to it.
2. Free up space on your HDD, although this is only a temporary measure to buy time. Dr. Smoke's FAQ Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk offers helpful advice. In addition, look at Where Did My Disk Space Go?.
3. Get a larger HDD. It is only a matterof time before any space you freed up fills up again. Here is a list of available HDDs from OWC.
Please post back with further questions/comments or an update on your situation.
Good luck.
cornelius

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I have an imac 2009 the disk drive is damaged and I have lost the passwords I need to reset passwords I tried booting with a macosx disk from an external hard drive but did not read the drive how else can I reset password ?

I have an imac 2009 the disk drive is damaged and I have lost the passwords I need to reset passwords I tried booting with a macosx disk from an external hard drive but did not read the drive how else can I reset password ?
I have a 2012 mac book pro can I use that to connect with firewire and load osx that way? and how woudl I do that?
Thanks so much!

To what password are you referring? Do you mean your user account's admin password? Or do you mean the master password for File Vault or do you mean a Firmware Password?
For an admin password:
Forgot Your Account Password
For Snow Leopard and earlier
     Mac OS X 10.6- If you forget your administrator password
For Lion/Mountain Lion
    Boot to the Recovery HD:
Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
     When the menubar appears select Terminal from the Utilities menu.
     Enter resetpassword at the prompt and press RETURN. Follow
     instructions in the dialog window that will appear.
     Or see Reset a Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Password and
     OS X Lion- Apple ID can be used to reset your user account password.
If you cannot do the above then try this:
1. Boot to Safe Mode by restarting and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND-S keys until a black screen with white type appears.
2. At the prompt, type the following commands pressing return after each command line:
     /sbin/fsck -yf
     If you do not receive a "Filesystem OK" message then repeat this command until
     you do. If after seven tries you still do not receive a "Filesystem OK" message,
     then the system is corrupted and needs to be reinstalled.
     mount -uw /
     cd /private/var/db/netinfo
     mv local.nidb local.old
     rm ../.AppleSetupDone
     shutdown -r now
The second-to-last command above will cause OS X to think that the operating system is newly installed, and when the new owner starts up the computer it will send him/her to the startup wizard where he/she can start a new user without reinstalling.
This last method does not actually change a password. It simply removes the user accounts and lets you create an initial admin account as if the computer were new out of the box.
How to reset the OS X password without a startup CD:
Reboot into Single-user Mode. Enter the following and press RETURN after each command line
   1. Type fsck -fy
   2. Type mount -uw /
   3. Type passwd <username>
I have never tried this method myself.

Restore from disk image on external hard drive

I have a early 2011 macbook pro and the internal hard drive failed. I installed OS X mavericks on an external hard drive (1) and I boot from the external drive (1). On a different external hard drive (2), I have a disk image of my macintosh HD (the computer's original hard drive with all my data on it) How do I go about restoring from the disk image on the external drive(2) to external hard drive (1)?
I want to be able to boot from the external hard drive (1) and have all my data that I backed up as a disk image on external hard drive (2)

I put the disk image in the source field and "backup" , the external drive I want it on, in the destination field
When I try to use disk utility it says it must scan the disk image first, then says "Unable to scan "Backup" (resource busy)"
"Backup" is the name of the external HD I am booting off of, which makes sense that it says resource busy. So how is this done?

Target disk mode with external hard drive?

Hi all,
I have a very annoying problem. I've just bought a new Mac Mini, previously I had an iBook G4 600 (about 6 years old). My Mac mini works perfectly, but...
1) I don't want to copy everything over from the iBook with Migration Assistant, I'd rather pick and choose what to copy. Is buying a firewire cable and using Target Disk mode the only quick way to do this?
2) I was intending to transfer files using my external HD. But the Mini doesn't recognise my poor old external drive. However, all my iTunes music is on the external HD. It seems by far the fastest way to get the music off (as long as I can't get the mini to recognise the HD)would be to boot the iBook in Target Disk mode then somehow be able to read from the external HD as well. Is this possible? If not, what on earth can I do??
Thanks in advance,
Suz
Message was edited by: Suz

Okay after testing, I am ready to conceded that you are correct that you can daisy chain an external drive and a TDM Mac together and have them mount both drives.
However. unless Suz proves me wrong (Which is always a possibility), I do not think that it will fix her initial problem. Since all's TDM does is allow the computer to act as a Firewire device, so it and the external hard drive, are simply 2 FW devices on a serial bus. If the new Mac Can't mount the external drive from the old computer, I doubt it would mount it with the old computer connected to it. (Unless there is just some funky thing going on that having another firewire device on the bus corrects?)
Let's see if it shows up in System profiler, and if it shows up there how does Disk Utility see it?
Have you also tried resetting the NVRAM?
Also just to be on the safe side, do you have another Firewire device that you can connect, to let us know that the port on the new mac is actually working?

Replacing two full external hard drives and keeping Lightroom 5 happy. Help please!

I use two external hard drives for storing photos and Lightroom backups - I do not have any photos stored on my Mac. As a result, they are almost full (25000 images) and I need to replace them with two higher capacity devices. I don't really know how to do this and still keep Lightroom 5 'onside'. I guess that I'd have to sync my drives one at a time with the new ones using Chronosync. Then, I'm also guessing that if I name the new drives exactly as I named the old ones, then Lightroom would carry on accessing the images as if nothing had changed. Am I correct with this assumption? If anyone out there has a better solution for me then I'd be very grateful for the advice. Thank you.

I don't blame you..
Definitely get things working with the new drives before re-formating (or deleting files from) the old drives. And make a copy of your catalog too. That way your vulrnerable parts are covered .
But Lightroom was designed to be able to withstand drive name changes on Mac, or drive letter changes in Windows..., so the odds are in your favor .
Cheers,
Rob

Backing up iBook and PC using same external hard drive.

I need some assistance. I have to send my iBook back to Apple to repair the wiring for the monitor-it fried and no back light. It was recommended I back it up before I send it in so I bought an external hard drive. It is large enough to handle both my PC desk top and laptop and the iBook. Will there be a problem putting both systems on the external or should I partition the external to hold the mac seperatly. I specifically need to back up my iPhoto (2400 photos) and my documents until I get it back. I use MS Office so I can go back and forth between the PC and Mac for work. But my main intent is to use the external for all three computers.
Thanks,
Wendy

Unless any file is larger than 4GB, FAT32 (MS-DOS) formatting will allow both the PC and the Mac to read/write files to the external drive.
iFelix

Disk repair for external hard drive

Hi, I gave my son an external hard drive to back up his school work, besides the normal backups of on the Time Capsule. So how he managed to hget the external hard dirve disappear from the screen while there is no back up left on the TC.
I have tried disk utility an number of time on several computers to get the External hard drive working. No luck there. I have tried restore in disk utility, but I cannot get the source and destination righty for a reason.
I have read an advice of Francine Schwieder dating back to 2007 where she advised to run terminator, this is the result I get while the xternal hard drive was connected to my Imac.
Last login: Sun Oct 9 22:14:37 on ttys000
imac-chf-baak:~ charles2008$
Last login: Fri Dec 7 20:58:20 on console
iMac:~ charles2008$
iMac:~ charles2008$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            999.3 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk1
   1:                  Apple_HFS lucas hard drive        1.0 TB     disk1s1
iMac:~ charles2008$
Last login: Fri Dec 7 21:19:20 on ttys000
iMac:~ charles2008$
With my limited knowledge, was a partition placed on this external hard drive ? I cannot see or acces the external hard drive.
Is there anyone who can help me with this ?
Hope to hear from you.
Charles
Francine Schwieder Southern Cal

If you wan to give Data Rescue 3 a spin (I'm testing it out now for the first time) you can get it - and a number of other apps - for $50 from MacUpdate's December Bundle.
Because I have redundant backups, I've never used either DiskWarrior or Data Rescue 3 - but I wanted to try it so that I will be able to know how well it works (or doesn't).
Clinton

Running Disk Utility off External Hard drive

To run "repair disk" in disk utility on my internal hard drive I'm supposed to insert my Install DVD, restart my mac and run disk utility - however running this program off the disk is much slower than running it off my 800firewire external hard drive. I've tried a few different ways of going about this:
1) Partitioning my hard drive in two (both HFS+) with more than enough room for the DVD, I've tried both making a Disk Image of the Install DVD and dragging it into the source field in the "restore" tab and dragged my Install partition into the destination field, after that was complete, I restarted my computer while holding the "alt" key I wasn't even offered the option to boot to my external hard drive
2) I've also tried after partitioning the external drive, in the restore tab just dragging the Install DVD (not the disk image) from the left of the disk utility window into the "source field" and again the partition into the destination field, and when restarting both with the "alt" key and by going to system preferences -> start up disk and choosing my external drive to boot from, I was still unable to boot off my drive.
Please let me know if anyone has any suggestions! This would be such a big help for me since I'm constantly helping people with diagnostic issues with their macs and this would save me so much time. Thanks in advance
George

I'm not sure why you can't make a bootable copy of the installer DVD using Disk Utility but as Niel suggests, it is much better to install the OS on a partition on the external drive using the DVD & then use that instead of a 'clone' of the DVD as a boot source to run utilities. There are several reasons for this:
1. You can update the installed version of the OS on the external to take advantage of any improvements, including to Disk Utility, that may be released in the future.
2. The version of Snow Leopard that runs from the DVD is a special one that among other things is optimized for read-only media. For instance, it doesn't write log files to the startup disk since it doesn't expect that to be possible.
3. You can include other utilities on the external & easily customize it to your liking. For instance, configure it for automatic login to an admin user account, drop Disk Utility into that account's login items & it will automatically launch at the end of the boot process. You can do the same with shell scripts or Applescript applications for just about as much automation as your scripting skills & imagination can dream up.
However, one thing to keep in mind: since a HD is not read-only but a DVD is, you can never be as certain that your external is as reliable as the DVD, since it is possible for something to change or corrupt files on the HD but short of physical damage the DVD is immutable.

Help freeing up disk space on external hard drive

trying to copy itunes library to external hard drive only to find i have insufficient space (need 100GB). deleted prior two itunes libraries and try again, but fail because external hard drive space is still insufficient. empty trash. eject external hard drive and reattach the thing. it still has insufficient space. make a new folder on external hard drive and copy all folders to this folder to see how much space all the files consume--the entire folder is 100GB, it is a 500 GB external drive, and it has only 21 GB free.
Why is the external hard drive which should have 400GB free, not freeing up the remaining space?
imac mac os x version 10.5.8 (free on hard drive about 20GB, so can't copy 100 GB back to hard drive and format or do whatever to external drive)
external hard drive is G-DRIVE mobile USB, purchased from apple I think.
OmniDiskSweeper used and just showed 100 GB used and 20 some Free. No huge files in trashes or temporary files.
Used DiskAid , and disk is normal, tried to repair but nothing to repair.
Suggestions please?

It sounds like there are multiple partitions on the drive, or perhaps only a small one with a lot of unallocated space.
See what Disk Utility (in your Applications/Utilities folder) says. Click the top line for the drive (with the make and size) in the sidebar. You should see something like this:
See if there's more than one partition (indented under the main line).
Also see what's shown for the Total Capacity.

Mac Mini has crashed - Disk Warrior and External Hard Drive Question.

I have Mac Mini that has crashed. I purchased Disk Warrior and was able to boot from the CD. Disk Warrior allowed me to see my files again but there is no way I can move them back onto my hard drive. I cannot grab them. Before I go into specifics....If I purchase an external hard drive and try to hook it up to my Mac Mini, will I be able move these files to this new external hard drive? Is this a possibility?
Or will my new external hard drive need to go through a set up phase - which might be impossible since hard drive I'm trying to take the files from is technically dead?
Sorry - I'm a novice at these things.

Hello, no apologies needed for being a novice, great you asked!
YES, depends where you buy the Drive, it may need Formatting first to Mac OS Extended...
How to format your disks...
http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/partitioning_tiger.html
(To Install OSX on an IntelMac the Drive it needs the GUID Partitioning scheme mentioned at the bottom.)
Thanks to Pondini, Formatting, Partitioning, Verifying, and Repairing Disks...
http://Pondini.org/OSX/DU.html
These generally come Mac Ready, & get Firewire if you have a Firewire port, much faster...
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/eSATA_FW800_FW400_USB
Then in DiskWarrior, hold Option or alt key when selecting Internal to repair, that will do the best job of Scavenging the directory & provide a whole new Drive icon to copy or clone your info over to the external drive.

Migrating old ibook's files on an external hard drive on to new iBook

I have an old white iBook G3 500 with a power adapter connector problem. Since I can no longer plug in the power adapter I transferred all of the old iBook's files to a bootable external firewire hard drive using the program Super Duper, which copies all files including system and hidden files. I then connected the hard drive to a G4 tower and booted it from the external drive. All of my files and applications worked fine.
Today I received a brand new iBook 14 Inch G4 1.42 GHz. When I start it up I would like to transfer all of the files and applications from the external drive. Can I just connect the external drive and tell the new iBook to transfer all of the files?
I have used the set up assistant once or twice before using firewire target mode, but because I use it so seldomly I want to make sure this was a proper way to migrate the data and applications from my old machine.
iBook 14 Inch G4 1.42 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Can I just connect the external drive and tell the new iBook to transfer all of the files?
Yes, assuming the external drive is a bootable clone. If it won't boot the old iBook, then the clone needs to be redone in such a way to make it bootable. It probably won't boot the new iBook unless it has 10.4.4 on it.

Disk utility / Startup disk is full when hard drive is more than 400 GB available

Hello, I have an iMac and I want to sell it, I wiped it out and reset to factory settings, so it has more than 450GB free, I am running the disk utility to Erase Free Space and to make sure the personal info its completely remove, but it's telling me half way through that my start up disk is full and then the Disk Utility just stops and it wont finish the process, I have to force quit disk utilities
Does someone know how can I fix this? Thank you so much

I was trying to clean up my hard drive and did the same thing. Do you have a file that was created to clean up in your trash? That may be why your hard drive is now full. I am in the process of trying to empty my trash to get rid of that file and the system won't let it erase all the way. I have a question out there for that as well.

I need to transfer all photos to an external hard drive. Many photos have been moved around or deleted from computer hard drive, but still have a very full hard disk. Are the photos with questionmarks in Lightroom still taking up hard disk space? I'm so l

Hi folks,
My hard disk is full. I already moved lots of photos from other folders on the hard disk to other external hard drives, so there are a lot of question marks in Lightroom. So, are those photos still taking up room on the computer hard disk? I want to move everything I have in Lightroom off of the computer to another external hard drive, in hopes that will free up space. I watched a tutorial, and read some things about it, but I need simple instructions please.

I cannot find this 300GB "Backup" in the Finder, only in the Storage info when I check "About This Mac".
You are probably using Time Machine to backup your MacBook Pro, right? Then the additional 300 GB could be local Time Machine snapshots. Time Machine will write the hourly backups to the free space on your hard disk, if the backup drive is temporarily not connected. You do not see these local backups in the Finder, and MacOS will delete them, when you make a regular backup to Time Machine, or when you need the space for other data.
See Pondini's page for more explanation: What are Local Snapshots? http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
I have restarted my computer, but the information remains the same. How do I reclaim the use of the 300GB? Why is it showing up as "Backups" when it used to indicate "Photos"? Are my photos safe on the external drive?
You have tested the library on the external drive, and so your photos are save there.
The local TimeMachine snapshot probably now contains a backup of the moved library. Try, if connecting your Time Machine drive will reduce the size of your local Time Machine snapshots.

FCE Express is writing render files to startup disk not external hard drive

Hi
I'm using FCE Express HD 3.5.1, with a MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, with 2 GB memory.
I'm using a Lacie big disk extreme as my scratch disk, and FCE is set up to write all render files to this. However, I noticed that my startup disk was becoming full and realised that FCE is writing render files to the startup disk not the external hard drive.
I've quit, shut down, etc...
Any ideas what is going on?
Many thanks
Helen

Whenever FCE is behaving strangely, one thing to try is trashing the preferences. Here's how:
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Can I run apple hardware disk from a clone of the Install disk 2 on an external hard drive?

I have just installed a new SATA cable and HDD and want to check everything is in order. I don't have my original disks with me, but I do have copies of both disks on an external hard drive. Can I use that to run Apple Hardware Test on my machine?

If nothing else works, give this a try:
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IBook G4: disk is full, external hard drive?

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