Problematic partitions and loss of hard drive space, please help me!

Hey there
I'm fairly new to macs but recently purchased a 2.4 macbook from the apple website. Upon arrival i decided to setup which went great.
Then the problems started.
I tried installing Windows XP using the Boot Camp Assistant and all was going well, until it restarted giving me the dreaded disk error (i used a service pack 1 CD the first time, only hearing about the problems when it was too late!).
I restarted the mac holding the C key down and attempted to delete the windows partition which had been created. Afterwards i seemed to be able to log back into leopard without any problems but i noticed that the hard drive had shrunk.
I reattempted a Windows installation using the service pack 2 disk this time and again this failed.
After calling apple they got me to erase all data on the 'Mac HD' and then do a fresh install of Leopard.
I've just finished this, and my 160gb hard drive 'Hitachi HTS542516K9SA00' is now claiming it has a capacity of 149.05. I believe this is fairly normal right?
However.. below that in the 'about my mac' listing is 'Mac HD' with a capacity of 137.88, and 120.17 available after the fresh leopard install.
From what i've read this isn't normal at all, and it's also been suggested that there are bits and pieces of the Windows partitions still left on my Macbook.
As i'm new to all this, i have no idea what to do about it. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated as i spent alot of money on this machine in the hope that i would be problem free!

can you go to Disk Utility (Applications --> Utilities --> Disk Utility), select your hard drive on the left (should say the size and make/model) and click on the "Partition" tab? then tell me what you see. i am running bootcamp and see two separate partitions, which i've named windows and mac.

Similar Messages

Running Out Of Hard Drive Space (PLEASE HELP)

Hello,
I am new to computers in general and Mac's in particular and need some suggestions, this is my first computer. The free space on my HD is running out and i was wondering if i could buy a new larger internal HD from apple and have it replaced? or if it would be better and easier to buy an external HD, like one from lacie or maxtor, and use that supplementaly? and what be would be the pros and cons of each.
any help, suggestions or personal experience would be greatly appreciated,
thanks
(sorry if i posted this in the wrong place)

Hello Luders (thanx for the fast response),
well the situation is the free space on there rignt now is enough for music, photos, documents et. al., but i am interested in putting some of my DVD collection on my HD for easy access as well as not worrying about the discs getting scratched, and maybe using Delicious Library, which i just read about a few days ago, to manage them, and i have two of my movies on their now but they take alot of space 14 GB's. My DVD collection is not that big only about 15 movies.
my computer seems to be slower, and i was wondering if this had anything to do with the diminishing capacity of my HD
thanks for your suggestion,
ruben

Do you have any ideas why Motion 5 would run slow on a computer? I have an Imac with 8Gigs of ram, and plenty of hard drive space, but it still gives me the beach ball when I add a few lights and effects. I'm at the end of my rope.

Do you have any ideas why Motion 5 would run slow on a computer? I have an Imac with 8Gigs of ram, and plenty of hard drive space, but it still gives me the beach ball when I add a few lights and effects. I'm at the end of my rope.

You probably don't really need 1080 at 60 for your finished projects but since you're just starting out with Motion, you need to lower your expectations. A long way. 1080 is about 2 million pixels per frame, DV is only about 400,000. That's not just five times as many pixels for the Mac to track; everything in video is exponential.
Explore the training tutorials available by Mark Spencer. You will get an idea of how his super powerful machine reacts with the software.
Adding a light roughly doubles the processing time over flat scenes. Two lights increases processing again. Reflections require processing the lights and then calculating the reflections so add another quarter of the time required for flat scenes. Add camera movement, motion blur, and depth of field and you need exponentially more processing time for every frame. The preload of renders into RAM is one of the cooler features of Motion, as comapred to After Effects, but that takes tons of time, to.
Try working in ye olde DV resolution for a few days. Get to know the software's limitations and what gets imposed by your Macintosh. Step up to 720p/30 and see how things slow down.

My PC computer was wiped (virus) including itunes. How do I transfer the many playlists and music to the new re-installed itunes?? Ipod is synced to old itunes. I have all original music files on external hard drive. Please help?

My PC computer was wiped (virus) including itunes. How do I transfer the many playlists and music on my ipod to the new re-installed itunes?? Ipod is synced to old itunes. I have all original music files on external hard drive. Please help?
New itunes is trying to wipe the ipod. But have many many playlists (many hours making) which I want to save. Any help would be appreciated.

If you want to just extract the playlists from your iPod, plug it in iTunes. When it appears under devices, right->click on it and choose Export Playlists. Save them to a location such as your desktop and them import them into your library once you have copied and imported all of your music back into it.
See this older post from another forum member Zevoneer covering the different methods and software available to assist you with the task of copying content from your iPod back to your PC and into iTunes.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2452022?start=0&tstart=0
B-rock

My hard disk crashed and I cannot find out how to "contact customer service" other than this forum. The website seems to just take me in a circle. I need to de-activate a license but cannot access the software due to a crashed hard drive. Please help.

My hard disk crashed and I cannot find out how to "contact customer service" other than this forum. The website seems to just take me in a circle. I need to de-activate a license but cannot access the software due to a crashed hard drive. Please help.

Hi Anthony ,
Here is the link to connect with Adobe Chat Support.
https://helpx.adobe.com/adobe-connect/kb/connect-chat-support.html
Hope your query gets resolved .
Regards
Sukrit Dhingra

My internal hard drive isn't being recognized on my macbook pro but when I put the HD in my Mac Pro (desktop), the desktop computer recognizes the HD. When I insert the installer CD on my laptop, it also doesn't recognize my hard drive. Please help!

My internal hard drive isn't being recognized on my macbook pro but when I put the HD in my Mac Pro (desktop), the desktop computer recognizes the HD. When I insert the installer CD on my laptop, it also doesn't recognize my hard drive. Please help! Thank you!
I've also been getting an image with the folder and question mark. I've tried everything on the apple support page but it doesn't seem to work either.

Well, I tried all of your suggestions and they didn't work -- no surprise because I was trying to backup to my external c.d. disk. Duh! The application for the home is in the mail.

Loss of Hard Drive Space

I'm running a macbook pro (mid 2009) 10.8.2 OSX. Ever since I upgraded the OSX my hard drive space is rapidly diminishing. I have 160 gig of space, but as of this morning it shows only 24.6 gigs are available. I've tried to locate where the 140 gigs of files are but cannot locate. I have approx 9 gigs in the library, 11 gigs in pictures no music (kept on an external) and 9G in applications. Any suggestions where the remaining 110 gigs could've disappeared to? And how I can get it back? The computer has really started running slow over the last few days as well.
Cheers,
Doc

First, empty the Trash if you haven't already done so. Then reboot. That will temporarily free up some space. According to Apple documentation, you need at least 9 GB free for normal operation. You also need enough space left over to allow for growth of your data. Use a tool such as OmniDiskSweeper to explore your volume and find out what's taking up the space. Proceed further only if the problem hasn't been solved. ODS can't see the whole filesystem when you run it just by double-clicking; it only sees files that you have permission to read. To really see everything, you have to run it as root. Back up all data now if you haven't already done so. No matter what happens, you should be able to restore your system to the state it was in at the time of that backup. Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways: ☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.) ☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens. ☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the page that opens. After installing ODS in the Applications folder, drag or copy — do not type — the following line into the Terminal window, then press return:sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper
You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up.
I don't recommend that you make a habit of this. Don't delete anything while running ODS as root. When you're done with it, quit it and also quit Terminal.

G4 Powerbook Hard Drive Problem - PLEASE HELP!!

I have a powerbook G4 15 inch alu. It is running OSX version 10.4.11
My system profiler tells me I have a 74.5GB hard drive with 69.34GB used, but I had wiped the HD in September 2008 and reinstalled the OS and few other programmes and files, so this shouldn't be the case at all.
I have found that my the problem is with my Users folder - within Users, my user account (the main account, I have another account setup so my mum can use her iPhone) has 67GB used. But when I go into my user account (clicking through the icons, after double-clicking the MacintoshHD desktop icon), none of the folders within my account run to anwhere near 67GB. Totalled, they come to around 10-15GB at most. There's a good 50GB or so of hard drive that just seems to be missing.
I ran Drive Genius to repair permissions and that eliminated a couple of GB of this 'missing space' but no more than that. How can I go about finding and reaccessing my lost hard drive space?
FWIW - I reinstalled the OS in September because this was my University laptop and the result of 4-5 years use had resulted in loads of unwanted files. I saved the important stuff to discs and then reinstalled because it was much easier (I thought) than trying to find and get rid of all the unwanted stuff.
Please please help. At the moment, the computer is running fine if a little sluggishly (understandable given how much of the hard drive is 'used'), but I had a nasty experience earlier this year with my G5's hard drive crapping ut and really don't want to end up in the same boat with this one. I also need that extra space back so I can use some programmes I can't install or work with as things stand.
Many thanks for taking the time to read this and respond, I don't know enough about computers to have any clue as to how to proceed, so your help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

eww - will do and report back.
cornelius - apologies for the ambiguity there. Hope this clears things up a bit:
Users folder = get info says 69.34GB used
Double-click on the Users folder and I get three folders - the shared folder, my mum's account folder, and my account folder. My account is the main/master account.
The shared folder is empty. My mum's account folder has a couple GB used, mine has 66.5GB used.
I double-click on my account folder, and get icons/folders for Desktop, Library, Movies, etc (the usual stuff). When I do Get Info for each of these, the sum of GB used by them is about 10-15GB, nowhere near the 66GB supposedly used.
If it helps any, the File System is Journalled HFS+
S.M.A.R.T. status is verified, and Drive Genius, Disk Warrior, and Disk Utility aren't picking up anything bad other than the corrupted permissions I repaired prior to making this post. Repairing permissions only freed up a few GB more space, still got 50 missing GB to locate and free up. Or start saving for a replacement HD, but if this is a sign of a crash, I'd rather know now so I can plan for that.
Many thanks to both of you for responding so quickly - hopefully this problem is solvable.
It doesn't make sense, there's nothing else which could have used those 'missing' GB. And, as I only reinstalled everything in September I know there's no way the few programmes I've added and 10 or so CDs I've copied onto the G4 could account for the missing 50GB. My HD should have most of its space free - minus the space used by OSX, any OSX updates, and literally a handful of small apps and files.

I can't format my hard drive! Please help!

I had a lot of problems with my Mac mini - related to CD burning, CD reading, ejecting discs, hard drive partitioning, Mac OS X Leopard installation... so I can't tell I am surprised with my new problem, which is...
I need to completely *erase my internal hard drive* on my Mac mini. So I opened Disk Utility, selected hard drive and went to Erase tab - I did everything as instructed by the app - but the "Erase..." button is not active! It's *not going to allow me to erase my hard drive*.
Please does anyone know why? I need to reformat the hard drive and I just don't know how.
Thanks, I hope this problem will be solved soon.

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
You can't reformat the drive you booted from, so in order to reformat the internal hard drive, you need to boot from the install disc that came with your mini (or a full retail MacOS install disk). That will provide you with an option to perform a full Erase and Install, performing the reformat and reinstallation in one go, or to open Disk Utility (in the Utilities menu) to perform a partitioning and reformat independently of a reinstall of MacOS.

Big problems after hard drive failure - Please help.

About 2 weeks ago, my Macbook seized, and was sent to Apple to repair.
It was found that the hard drive failed, and 2 weeks later I received my macbook back with a new hard drive.
Luckily I had backed up my home drive and was able to restore it using backup.
Now this is where my problems start.
My home drive is not the same name ( I think - I can'r remember too well what it was called previously )
I have my entire music library backed up to an external hard drive, and mounting this hard drive is a REAL pain in the *** now.
Sometime it loads up, sometime it just doesn;t get recognised, and I can put the USB connection in and out 10 times before it mounts.
I have verified the disk, and nothing is wrong.
Does anyone know what this problen could be ?
I have left the external hard drive in during the night, and after the macbook goes to sleep, I will go back to it in the morning, and the hard drive has been unmounted, and I repeat the exercise over again of trying to mount the drive.
Its so annoying, and I just dont know wht to do.
If anyone can help, I;d really appreciate it.
Griff

SMART status is a pretty reliable indicator of what is going on. You should back up your irreplaceable files as soon as possible.

IBook Possible Hard Drive Corruption - Please help diagnose

I left my iBook to download overnight and when I got up, it was really slow and laggy so I restarted it but it continually kept getting frozen at the last login screen, so I backed up my data via firewire, and erased the hard drive, and then installed OSX again. It worked for a bit, but then it crashed again, and between all these steps I have been repairing the hard drive using disk utility. It says that there is nothing wrong with the hard drive, but then it changes its mind after I've installed OSX again and it says there's a problem. Currently, the hard drive is blank, but it is coming up with a problem when I try and repair disk. The error that shows up is: "The underlying task reported failure on exist." as well as "Catalog file entry not found for extent."
I'm trying to diagnose the problem myself. I suspect that it is some form of hard drive failure. I don't want to take it in the shop because that will cost about $40 just to get it checked out, and I plan on installing a new hard drive myself if I find that that is the necessary step. If anyone has had similar problems, or knows what part needs to be replaced, I would really appreciate it.
Thanks!
PS. If someone has some time and has more experience in diagnostics, please feel free to message me on msn at roycelee@hotmail dot com

This is the best way to Erase and Install. First backup all your important stuff, if you can, as the following will erase everything on your drive; it will be unrecoverable. Put your install disk in your Mac and Restart while holding down the C key. In Tiger, When you get to the install screen, don't click install and go to the title bar at the top of the screen and click on Utilities (in earlier OS's click on the installer menu).
Click on Disk Utility and choose the hard drive you want your OS on. Then click on the Erase tab. In Tiger, click on the Security Options button near the bottom (it's similiar for Panther and Jaguar).
Once in there choose Zero Out Data (write zero's in earlier versions). This will map out any bad blocks on your drive and bring it back to almost new condition (providing there's nothing wrong mechanically with it, bad bearings, defective or damaged surface, etc.).
Once this is done, go back to the install screen and begin the "Erase and Install" installation. This will put a factory fresh system on a clean hard drive.
Cheers!
DALE

I recently deleted a partition on my mac that was intended to install windows. Now it is just blank space. I attempt to resize my Macintosh HD partition to cover entire hard drive space and hit apply but nothing happens (disk utility). Any ideas?

I have a few problems...
I wanted to make a partition to install windows, I tried to use bootcamp 5 where it wanted to partition and install windows at the same time. I do not have a cd of windows but instead had it on a flash drive. Bootcamp couldn't find it. Instead I was reading forums and found that there was another way to install windows by partioning your harddrive using the disk utility, downloading the bootcamp drivers, and installing rEFIt (an app that when starting the compouter a menu would come up to boot windows from the flashdrive). I try that and the windows install screen gets me to the point where I pick a partition. I attempt to pick the partitioned drive but a message comes up telling me that "this is of the GPT partition style" and windows cannot be installed on the drive.
So now I went back to disk utility and deleted the partition but there is still blank space. I wanted to retry and install windows through bootcamp (somehow) but a message comes up that there cannot be any partitions or that a partition must be created using bootcamp. SO i keep trying to drag the partition over the blank space and hit apply but nothing happens.
By the way I was trying to install windows 8 pro, some forums would say that you cant install win8 however I found others that said you could. How do I fix my partition and how do I use bootcamp to install windows (preferrably 8)?

Csound1 What Ive been trying to explain is that I have been running bootcamp, I open the app where the first screen is the introduction, i hit continue, the first time I select "download the latest windows support software fromm Apple" then I return and instead select "Install Windows 7." Then hit continue. The third screen is where I "Create a Partition for Windows" I set Windows to 80 gigs then hit INSTALL. As stated before Bootcamp cannot find the install drivers saying "The installer disc could not be found." My windows software is on a USB drive not a disc, I tried using a virtual disc reader to make it appear that the windows software was running on a disc, still no luck. What I would like to know is how to install windows on bootcamp.

Partitioning and Formatting USB Hard Drive

I'm using a FreeAgent USB hard drive on my system, but placed a lot of files on it before realizing that Mac can't write to an NTFS file system. I've got about 35 GB of files on a 250GB drive. So, two questions:
1. Is there something I can use to partition the drive and format part of it to FAT32 and part of it to the Mac format (realizing that I won't be able to read the Mac formatted partition in Windows).
2. Is it possible to partition the drive without removing the files that are now on it and reformatting (obviously leaving part of it as NTFS)?
I'll probably be able to do 1, but just thought I'd ask about 2 for information purposes.
Thanks,

I suppose I could just format it FAT, but I have some vague notion that the Mac format will work better with the Mac OS, especially for backing up. I'd primarily use the Mac partition for backup, and for storage of video files that just take up too much space on the MacBook internal HD. Don't know how realistic that is, and I'm also not sure which backup program would be best suited. I'm pretty new to the Mac environment, and am not even all that sure whether to keep the *.dmg files that I've used to install several programs that I purchased for the Mac.

Need help to partition and format new hard drive for T400

The HDD failed in my T400. I bought a new 1TB HDD and fitted it. The diagnostic software in the BIOS did a read and controller test (Passed). When I put the Windows XP disk in the CD reader, the setup started - then stalled at the "Windows setup" page. I thought the hard drive had a write problem but apparently it must be partitioned and formatted first, before Widows setup can commence. The thing is that I can't get to the option where Windows formats the drive. In old computers, there was always a partitioning option in the BIOS setup but in my T400, there doesn't appear to be any such option. The computer has 4GB RAM, the actual model is 2767-RV8.
Does anyone have any suggestions how to get this up and running?
One other question is - (assuming I can get the thing working) - Is there somewhere I can load the operating system on part of the hard drive where it can act as a fall back in case the operating system gets corrupted? - i.e. something that can't get attacked by malicious software?
Thanks in advance for any assistance.
Ian

Hi irivlin,
If you are trying to clean install XP, then you have to do following setting in BIOS first:
Press F1 to BIOS, Config -> Serial ATA (SATA) -> change to "Compatibility"
You can change XP partition only if you are doing clean installation, otherwise you have to use 3rd party to do it.
For backup part, there are lots of choices in the market. You might consider using XP own backup function. Lenovo got a program called Rescue and Recovery can also do backup as well.
How to use the Backup utility to back up files and folders in Windows XP Home Edition
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/320820/en-us
Rescue and Recovery® 4.23 by Lenovo
http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/product-and-parts/detail.page?&LegacyDocID=MIGR-76225
Fred
T61 + X201i

Extensive loss of hard drive space

I have a late 2012 MacBook Air and today I moved my mac up staris with 11.43GB(what it had read for the last week) free on my hard drive and when it came out of sleep, not but a minuet latter, it read 2.16GB (and it still does) I have tried verifiing/repairing my disk using CleanMyMac2 but nothing it was gust gone 9GB lost I had been doing nothing besides browsing the internet on Safari. I even tried this with no such luck https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3738974?tstart=0 just poof gone.

You didn't do anything wrong. It is the system that willl costantly use more and more disk space.
If your Air has only a 128GB SSD you have way to much stuff on it to begin with. You should have a clear 20GBs+ of free space on your system at all times.
Also there is a Feature enabled by default on Mac notebook computers. That is the Time Machine Local Snapshot system. It makes hourly backups of files you have changed and makes copies of any file you have deleted. This system is supposed to automatically stop doing this when disk space get above 80% used ad it is supposed to Auto delete these temp backups to free disk space if that disk space is needed. That has not been the experience I have had with this feature.
You can read more about it on this website.
http://www.pondini.org/TM/30.html
Then you can make the decision to either leave it turn on, to turn it off or to turn it off then turn it back on.

Problematic partitions and loss of hard drive space, please help me!

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for