Macintosh HD and Bootcamp Installer Disagree on Free space on Hard Drive

Im having a hard drive issue.
I have 500 gb and macosx shows about 300gb free.
I'm attempting to install windows and the assistant gives about 100gb of space but I'd like 200 or so for windows.
Theres a discrepancy in available hard drive space!
I had installed windows prior and made the mistake of following some bad advice and re partitioning for extra space within windows 8. After this I lost the windows partition. I have a third party disk utility that says the drive needs repaired. The drive has issues with discrepancies in drive space and sectors used and not used. The volume gets repaired and allowed some more space for windows (the 100gb) but I should assumably be allowed most all the free space available and would like to (iI have an external for large files).
How can I fix this? I dont mind command line. Are there third party utilities?

You have two issues.
1. Partitioning within Windows and OS X are using two different personalities of a disk, and if not kept in sync, you run into this issue. Apple does not allow Windows partition to be resized because they do not provide the appropriate tools to keep them in sync.
2. If you are willing to take a backup of OS X and all your files, the cleanest method is to erase the drive and restore from a backup, preferably using a Time Machine backup.

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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!

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I have a Powerbook G4 with a 100GB hard drive. For almost a year, I've had about 60GB used and about 40GB free. All of a sudden, My free space dropped to 12.4GB.
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More like 5 GB free; you can improve matters somewhat by using the Installer's advanced options to install only the language(s) you actually use. Keep in mind that after updating, you still want to keep several GB free space on the HD to permit creation of the temporary disc files used in CD and DVD burning.
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When I try to create a new partition from this free space in Disk Utility, it prompts me to start creating the partition, but nothing happens after that. I can leave the machine alone for hours, and nothing has occurred. Disk Utility thinks it's working though, since it prompts me to cancel the process when exiting the app.
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2. You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.
3. Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.
4. Also see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.
5. See Where did my Disk Space go?.
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You should consider replacing the drive with a larger one. Check out OWC for drives, tutorials, and toolkits.
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Here's another way:
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The second way, you'll also have multiple catalogs, each will be bigger by amount added since last archive... Again, you are unlikely to fall back to one of these, but you could, especially if you save xmp too, in which case you could recover most work by falling back to most recent archive catalog and read xmp metadata for all photos edited since then.
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Some of the newer PC's don't have internal drive space because they have raid'ed drives.
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Unable to free space on hard drive

I have been unable to free up space on my startup disk. I deleted several GB of movies and they did not go to the trash bin so I assumed they were deleted. However, when I monitored the storage on the System Information panel, before and after deleting this movies I observed negligible change in storage space.
Some other info:
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Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive
1. See Lion/Mountain Lion/Mavericks' Storage Display.
2. You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.
3. Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.
4. Also see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.
5. See Where did my Disk Space go?.
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Does Erase Free Space Degrade Hard Drive?

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This seems like an awful long time to have your laptop sitting on and open let alone your disc spinning and writing. Does this process degrade, slow down or have any seriously harmful side-effects to your hard drive?

My question is simply, 3 days of nonstop writing to zero out free space from insecure trash empties (some people might have important goverment docs, I don't know) seems like long enough to burn out your drive in one single process, no?
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Are you concerned that running the computer with its display open is hazardous to its health? Nothing could be farther from the truth. It cools itself more efficiently with the display open than with the display closed. Apart from that, having the lid open or closed makes no difference at all.
Out of curiosity, what do you consider "awkward" about having the computer go to sleep when you close the display?
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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!!!
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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.
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No easy fix for a few reasons:
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Win7 x64 booting natively via EFI (no bios emulation)
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My recomendations:
1) Install on a second smaller hard-drive; or
2) Wait for the EFI app to come out officially and use that to boot Windows Vista SP1 x64 and Windows 7 x64 (RTM and SP1) in the native EFI mode.
3) Wait for Windows 8 which supports VGA-less booting acording to the AMD presentation at UEFI Plugfest.

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SMART is a technology that monitors the drive for signs of impending failure. You can verify that SMART is indicating a problem in Disk Utility. Select the hard drive and look at the bottom of the window. It should look like this:
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Anyone?

Can not shut down late 2011 MacBook Pro and turn it back on again without the hard drive disappearing?

Ok, I have searched for months for an answer to this question to no avail, probably because no one has experienced it before. I am hoping however that you guys can help me figure this one out cause it is driving me nuts! Also, I am not entirely sure what section of the support I should put this under so if I stick it in the wrong place, I apologize.
Right now my problem is very simple. When I turn off my laptop, and then try to turn it back on, my internal hard drive disappears... and I get the blinking folder with a question mark on it. I have figured out something interesting however. I have an install disk with Ubuntu Linux on it. If I boot into that first, then RESTART the laptop, not shut down and turn back on, it reads the internal hard drive just fine and I can boot as if there is nothing wrong.
Second part to the problem... If I allow the laptop in either OSX or Windows to go to sleep (aka shut off the hard drive but the computer remains on), when I attempt to wake it up, I am greeted with the usual log in screen of whichever OS I am in, but is frozen and after a few seconds goes black and restarts the computer to find that... Surprise! The hard drive is gone
I have tried every trick in the book that I can think of, but can not seem to come up with a solution to the problem... I know when the problem happened and if anyone thinks that that will help them figure this out I will type everything I did up till, including the crash that caused this, and my attempted fixes, but I have class right now so only if you guys want it I will type all that out.
What I am currently running is:
2011 MacBook Pro 13in screen
4Gb of Ram
1TB internal Hard Drive
OSX 10.11.whatever the newest update is... just updated the other day again.
Windows 8.1 on BootCamp 5 (yea I know its not supposed to work but it does) again, fully updated
Ubuntu 13.10 (I think? Doesn't really matter, its just an install disk I use to boot the computer)
If there is anything else that you guys need me to provide, I can, just simply ask. I can provide as much info as is necessary.

Sorry it took me so long to write back, But unfortunately this didn't help my issue.
My uncle and I did a lot of tests on this computer and have narrowed down the location of the problem a little bit.
We tried to first reset the SMC and the NVRAM as suggested, but the only thing that did was make the fans run on full tilt for the first session after restarting it for some reason. After that we tried re installing OSX over the OSX that was already on the system (not removing any of the files). This also didn't do anything but make refit stop working. Then we moved onto the next task at hand by removing the hard drive entirely and booting it as an external drive from one of the USB ports... as long as you booted it with the options key held down, it worked perfectly fine. Then we put an alternative hard drive into the computer and installed OSX on that. This time there was no trouble booting anything up. Everything seemed to work flawlessly. So we made a backup of my original drive (OSX, Windows, and all) onto an external hard drive and tested booting to it via USB. That again worked perfectly fine and booted right up with no problems. So after that we formatted the original hard drive and reinstated OSX. We then proceeded to transfer all the old files from the backup onto this new installation and LOW AND BEHOLD..... we were back to square one with it refusing to recognize the hard drive again.
So this basically told us that there appears to be something either wrong with the hard drive, or something got really screwed up in the software along the lines and by me copying all my old files back over, I just ended up bringing the screwed up file back over with it! (despite not copying over any settings of any kind) So I am still extremely confused as to what is going wrong... did some boot sector possibly get screwed up may be?

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.
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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.

Macintosh HD and Bootcamp Installer Disagree on Free space on Hard Drive

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