Re: Disc Utility & Free Space

Hello, My brother tried to Securely Empty the trash on files that had already been deleted so he went to Disc Utility, then clicked the hard drive, then went on the erase tab and did "Erase Free Space". Now instead of having 100+ Free GB of Space, there is 148.73 KB. What steps do I take to recover this space?
Thanks.

Sorry, I just found a more appropriate spot to post my problem so if an Admin could delete this topic, it'd be greatly appreciated. Sorry for the confusion.

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Disc utility inconsistent free space

Hey guys,
My hard drive reports inconsistent free space using various methods.
When I click "get info" on my Macintosh HD, it reports 18GB free.
When I use disk utility, it reports 7GB free.
After verifying the partition, I ran a disk repair using the disc utility on startup and the free space bumped up to 12GB. Strangely, when I exit startup repair and run disk utility after entering the OS, disk utility still reports 7GB. Re-entering the startup disc utility reports 12GB free space!
My hard drive is an OCZ Vertex II LE 60GB SSD.
Ultimately I am trying to create a partition for bootcamp, but it keeps telling me i have less than 10GB free space. I can understand if "get info" is unable to see certain files due to permissions, but why should disk utility report different values via startup and OS? Is there any way around this so that I can get bootcamp to allow me to create the partition?
Any help would be great, thanks!
-Jon

jonlee016 wrote:
Hey guys,
My hard drive reports inconsistent free space using various methods.
When I click "get info" on my Macintosh HD, it reports 18GB free.
When I use disk utility, it reports 7GB free.
Disk Utility will show two different "free" readings, depending on where you look.
Sounds odd, but they're for different purposes. The larger figure, which the Finder and other things will use, is the total free space available.
The second is the amount of free space available for a new partition. It's shown when you select the top line for the drive, click the Partition tab, then select a partition, the "Available" amount may be smaller.
This is because partitions, unlike folders, must occupy contiguous space on a disk. The data on your OSX partition is scattered over it, not all nicely packed together. That's normal, as you add, update, and delete files, not every nook and cranny is used again immediately.
But whether there's 7 GB free or 18, that probably isn't enough to be adding a partition; it's probably too little for OSX to operate well. There's no "hard and fast" rule, but you should always have at least 10 GB or 10% of your OSX drive free; many folks say 15% or more.
You could back up your drive (on two different HDs, to be safe), reformat it to 2 parttions, then restore the backup. But it's going to be very tight, and you'll likely have performance problems because of it.
Try to delete anything you don't need, and/or offload stuff you don't use often and delete it.

Erase free space function of Disk Utility

Hi all,
I've read some of the discussions about the problems that can result from using Disk Utility to permanently delete items that have been emptied from the Trash (and which were not "securely" emptied). Before I use the Disk Utility function, I'd appreciate some advice:
1. I have an iBook G4, running Mac OS 10.4.11. My hard disk has a capacity of 55 GB with 30 GB available. Does the capacity available matter, and is mine sufficient?
2. Will I be given an option on overwriting the files 0, 7, or 35 times, and should I choose 7?
3. How long is this operation likely to take?
4. Shall I just start the operation and then not touch the computer for a few hours, or overnight, and hope for the best??
5. A final question (a stupid one, I hope!) -- only those files which were put in the trash will be deleted, right?? Not anything else?!
I am quite worried about taking the step because, if things go wrong, I won't have a means of contacting the Apple support forum as this is the only computer in our household.
I am planning on giving this iBook to a nephew in six months or so, and am gradually cleaning it up for that purpose. But I'm not ready to "zero it out" entirely and I am hoping not to lose anything currently on my hard drive following the "erase free space" operation, or to have to reboot from the original CDs.
If the operation is successful, I will then remember to always use the "Secure Empty Trash" option when deleting future files. I'm assuming that, if I do that, I should have no concerns about giving the laptop away -- correct?
As you can tell, I'm not very computer savvy, and I'd be very grateful for help. Thank you!

Open Disk Utility, Highlight your drive on the left, then on the right bottom you'll see Verify Disk & below that Repair Disk grayed out because you can't reopair the HD yo're booted from, if it does need Repair...
1. Insert the Mac OS X Install disc, then restart the computer while holding the C key.
2. When your computer finishes starting up from the disc, choose Disk Utility from the Installer menu. (In Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you must select your language first.)
*Important: Do not click Continue in the first screen of the Installer. If you do, you must restart from the disc again to access Disk Utility.*
3. Click the First Aid tab.
4. Select your Mac OS X volume.
5. Click Repair. Disk Utility checks and repairs the disk."
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
Then try a Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, reboot when it completes

How can I add new content in iDVD to a DVD-RW disc which has ample remaining free space? After preparing the new video for burning and clicking on Burn to iDVD, I get a window saying the disc's already recorded and that I can either Erase or Eject.

How can I add new content in iDVD to a DVD-RW disc with a video previously successfully recorded on it? (The disc has ample remaining free space.)
After preparing the new video for burning and clicking in the File menu on Burn to iDVD, I get a window saying the disc's already recorded and that I can either Erase or Eject. My assumption has been that iDVD would automatically find the free space and continue with the new recording from there. I'd be grateful if anyone can shine light on this.

There are, but not with a DVD written as a movie disk. It must be closed when completed, or it doesn't work.
Apple's built in Burn utility also automatically closes any data CD, DVD or Blu-ray disk you burn. Doesn't matter how much space is unused, you can't use it. You'd have to use a more advanced disk creation app, such as Toast Titanium. I then have the option of choosing to write the data as a session:
I can keep doing this until the disk is full. If I've written five sessions to the disk, when I put it in the drive, five CD/DVD icons will appear on the desktop since the OS will treat each session as if they are separate physical disks. At any point you choose Write Disk when writing a group of data, that means you're closing the disk, and again can't add anything after that. So if I had written two sessions, and the third was Write Disk, it's over. I can't put anything else on that disk.

The disc inserted does not have enough free space

I created a disk image about 451 MB, it an Audio Disk. When I try to write the image to a blank Memorex CD-R 700 MB I get the message: "The disc inserted does not have enough free space".
When I created the image I used the disk utility and followed the help file instructions. When I open File> New> I can only select "disk image from folder", the other option is grayed out.

wow, this is my first real disappointment with my MacBook. I can't burn images, technical support didn't get me any further than I already was. I spent half a day trying everything in the world to burn an image with no success.(followed all the help instructions) Now I have to go into the Apple store to have them go through all the same stuff I went through today. Two days of working on this computer to burn a CD with no success.
My guess is that at the end of the day tomorrow I will walk away from the store with no computer because of a malfunction. What a wasted weekend.

Disk Utility - Erase Free Space - Creating Temporary File Freeze

I used "Erase Free Space" with Disk Utility after trashing several files I no longer wanted on the hard drive or recovered. I used "Zero Out Deleted Files" option. It took over 12 hours before an error message appeared "Your start up disk is almost full. You need to make more space available on your start up disk by deleting files." I thought that was what I was doing. Disk Utility continued but got stuck on "Creating Temporary File." I force quit Disk Utility after several more hours. I had to manually shut down the computer because the restart command wouldn't work. It rebooted and appears to be OK. Evidently, this temporary file consumes significant amounts of disk space. This is an older iMac with 10.4.11 (18 GHz PowerPC G5) - I know, pretty old but I still have OS 9 on it and several files I need to extract before I trash it.
1. Should I do nothing? The iMac seems to be working fine.
2. How do I know if this Temporary File exists and consuming space? Spotlight doesn't find it. Where is it?
3. Is my start up disk in fact almost full? How would I know that?
Thanks!

Then I would not do any secure erasing. It's exceptionally time consuming and unnecessary. Before you take it in for recycling boot it from your OS X installer DVD. Do this:
Drive Partition and Format
1. Boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Apply button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Security button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
A one-pass Zero Data option is all that is required to prevent access to your erased files.

'Erase Free Space Utility' problem

Hi everyone, I wonder if you could spare your time in helping me with what I believe is a bit of a fixable dilemma but I just am not sure how to fix the problem.
I ran the 'Erase Free Space' option on my hard disk through the Disc Utility application but unfortunatly the application crashed at around 30% completion and I am left with only 6.5MBs of free disk space (previously being 72MBs free).
I have found out how to fix the problem but really do not know how to access '/var/root/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems' as explained below to obtain and remove the files 'EFTFile1.sparseimage'.
I would be very very grateful if someone could point me in the right direction.
Many thanks.
"Disk Utility accomplishes the erase feature by creating large sparse image files in a preset directory. It then deletes them with the srm tool (secure remove) and an overwrite pattern of your choice. If Disk Utility is interrupted, this sparse image is left on the disk just taking up space. Starting another free space erase session makes another file, instead of cleaning up the previous one. So, as there are no checks in Disk Utility for cleaning up this failed process, so you have to hunt it down manually.
There are a variety of ways of doing this, but I’ll cut to the chase and give you the answer. The files are created in /var/root/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems and are sequential variations of the name EFTFile1.sparseimage. Simply remove these files (as root) to reclaim your free space and then start the process again to finish the task."
Message was edited by: Chris Kerr

Chris Kerr wrote:
I ran the 'Erase Free Space' option on my hard disk through the Disc Utility application but unfortunatly the application crashed at around 30% completion and I am left with only 6.5MBs of free disk space (previously being 72MBs free).
72 MB is way too little disk space for Mac OS X to run properly. You need to delete some files in order to give Mac OS X and applications more space. If that's why you're running "Erase Free Space", then you're not doing the right thing. Erase Free Space will overwrite all the free space on your hard drive with random data: the free space will remain free, but you will not get any extra free disk space after doing this. Erase Free Space's purpose is to make deleted data unrecoverable, for example if you deleted many sensitive files without using Secure Empty Trash and want to make sure the they can't be recovered.
You should be able to use Terminal to remove the sparseimage, but you should really delete or move a lot of stuff to another hard drive first; you need at least a few GB of free space if you want Mac OS X to run normally.

Disk Utility's "Erase Free Space" screwed me over big time. Help Please.

Hey, I have a serious dillema. I free'd up disk space on my mac by transfering files to an external drive, and then used Disk Utility to erase unused disk space to do a thorough cleaning. Now it seems that out of thin air, Disk Utility said my Mac is out of disk space....it basically filled up my hard drive with 370GB's of god knows what.
Here's exactly what I did, step by step:
Basically, I wanted to clean up my hard drive a bit, as I was using about 500GB's out of my 750GB HD (on my MBP 10.6.8)
-Before I did this test, I did a verify + repair disk permissions, I also organized my computer's files... and just to be safe, I booted up from the D key so I could do an extended hardware test to see if everything was running smoothly. I then zapped the PRam. This was my pre-clean maintenence check.
-Then I transferred all of my files onto my external disk.
-After this was done, I dumped the files (that I used to transfer to my External) into the trash bin.
-I emptied the trash bin.
-Now I free'd up hundreds of GB's of space.
-It said that I had 376 GB's of free space in my hard drive. Yay.
Now here where it all went wrong:
-I heard that if you go into Disk Utility, and click on "Erase Free Space" that it goes over all the delted files (that aren't actually permanently deleted) and it permanently deletes them so that it frees up all the loose ends on your mac. I didn't want any ghost files, or any old installs or whatever...so I thought, yes.
Now...Disk Utility was doing this for me....and 2 hours later....it said that I was out of disk space. Disk Utility froze around the 90% completion-mark when it was "Creating Volume" (or something like that) and I had to quit Disk Utility.
Then, I exited....went onto my desk top and checked my Hard Drive.
It said that I had ZERO KB's available.
My hard disk was completely full. How is this even possible? I had 376 GB's of EMPTY space 2 hours earlier.
I tried to go into all of my files to see if there were any duplicates made..I checked terminal to see what went wrong, I checked console...I searched, and I searched...and nothing.
What. The. Heck.
Can someone please, please help me?

Boot from your installation disc, erase the internal drive in Disk Utility, reinstall OS X, copy the files from your backup, and then run Software Update.

I am trying to install Boot Camp but it says I haven't got enough free space to make a partition, however in disk utility it says I have 27GB free!

I am trying to install Boot Camp but it says I haven't got enough free space on my start up disk - that I need at least 10GB free space - however in disk utility it says I have 27GB free!

if your SSD is only 60 GBs, then you don't have space on which to install Windows. That 27 GBs is space you need to have for adding files you create, music you download, added applications, pictures, etc. You need to maintain at least 10 GBs as free space for OS X, plus you need space for files OS X will create and add to over time.
Your 60 GB SSD is just a minimum usable size for OS X. There isn't sufficient space to also support Windows which requires close to 25 GBs of the 27 GBs you still have free. Sorry, but that just doesn't really work well.

My external hard drive accidentally switched off during Disk Utility's "erase free space" process. I restarted the external hard drive and Disk Utility, but now I get the "couldn't mount disk" error when trying to finish the erase. Please help!

My external Lacie Quadra hard drive accidentally switched off in the middle of "erase free space", and when I switched it back on Disk Utility was hanging. So I Force Quit Disk Utility and restarted it. Now when I try to erase I get
"Secure Disk Erase failed with the error: Couldn’t unmount disk."
But "erase free space" seems to work...
What can I do? I'm erasing as I'm giving the drive to someone else and I wanted to wipe it clean.
Also should I use "erase" or "erase free space" if I want to wipe the drive clean?
Please help!

Sorry I don't really understand.... there are no partitions on the drive. How do I repartition it?
And should I use "erasing free space" or "erase" for wiping clean my drive of everything? Erase seems to be faster last tiem I tried.
Thanks!

HT201364 Hello ! i have a question about my Hard's Disc storage space. I have Mac book Pro 11" Retina with hard disk 120 GB . I want to make this update but its impossible because of no free space. And now i want to ask. Its 120 GB full space but i dont k

Hello ! i have a question about my Hard's Disc storage space. I have Mac book Pro 11" Retina with hard disk 120 GB . I want to make this update but its impossible because of no free space. And now i want to ask. Its 120 GB full space but i dont know how. It tells me lets say i have 30 GB movies but i dont have anything ! Can you help me with any way ? If i can do something to see what movies let's say means !
Thank you !!

Hope this helps.
1. Empty Trash.
    http://support.apple.com/kb/PH10677
2. Start up in Safe Mode
    http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11212
3. Delete "Recovered Messages", if any.
    Hold the option key down and click "Go" menu in the Finder menu bar.
    Select "Library" from the dropdown.
    Library > Mail > V2 > Mailboxes
    Delete "Recovered Messages", if any.
    Empty Trash. Restart.
4. Repair Disk
    Steps 1 through 7
    http://support.apple.com/kb/PH5836
5. Disk space / Time Machine ?/ Local Snapshots
   http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4878
6. Re-index Macintosh HD
   System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy
   http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2409
If this does not help, you have to buy an external HD and move your movies photos.etc to
the external HD.

Time Capsule full after a "Erase Free Space" using Disk Utility

Hello,
I am facing some issues related to my Time Capsule.
Reviewing my past, I had a lot of backups on this, using Time Machine and it always worked pretty well. But after deleting some backups manually to reclaim disk space, this was not exactly freeing it.
Searching in the forum here, I saw that I could mount the backup sparsebundle image and map it into the Disk Utility. This always worked greatly too both for disk checking and reclaiming the space back.
The problem starts on the last Friday when I performed the operation again, but it started using the whole free space that I had and did not give it back.
Studying the case I found that it creates a temporary folder to store the file it creates to write the byte 0 on the disk. This file actually resides in the sparsebundle image and therefore I can see the file with 200GB, for example, in the Finder, this is a split in bands (8MB) just like the backup is. After the disk gets full, the Disk Utility should delete the file properly and give me back the space safely.
Right now my Time Capsule has 0 byte free and I can't do anything on it beyond redo the the Erase Free Space operation. When I do it, it starts writing the temporary file again and the problem repeats itself.
I know that if I backup the data and really erase the disk, I'll get it back, but this is not an option for me because I want a smart solution for this.
The only thing that changed between when it worked and now is the 10.5.6 update that I made and I'd like that it's not the root of the issue.
Is there any suggestion or general stuff I could do to fix it?
Did anybody already face the same issue?
If anyone needs more details to help me out of this, just let me know.
Thanks and regards,
Eduardo

Just another thing to add, I'd like a good solution for this as the redo operation from Disk Utility takes around 2 days and then it just "dies".

Disk Utility - Erase Free Space

Hey Forum,
I am using mac snow leopard on my macbook and I wanted to erase the free space on my hard drive, so is the zero-out free space enough, or do I need the 7-pass erase free space. I just wanted more disk space, thats it. So can anyone tell me what are each options for? And do i need to 7-pass erase if i just wanted more disk space?
I await your favorable replies.
Thank you.
Regards.
Ala.

As The hatter says, the erase free space option has nothing to do with creating more free disk space -- the space is already free.
If you are confused about this, just open Disk Utility to the "Erase" tab & click the purple question mark at the bottom of the window. This will open Disk Utility Help to the topic *Erasing disks*. Refer to the last subject, *Securely erasing empty space* & if necessary click the link below it to go to the help topic *Erasing free disk space*, which explains this function in more detail.
FWIW, should you ever need to use this security function, a one pass secure erase is probably adequate to make the data unrecoverable.

7-pass, or zero out-Disk Utility Erase Free Space

Hey Forum,
I want to clear my erase free space on disk utility. And I am confused, whether to use 7-pass or zero-out? Any suggestions which one to use. Is zero out enough, or is 7-pass too much, any suggestions of whether to use either of them is appreciated, thank you.
Ala.
P.S. What are zero-out, 7-pass, and the 35 thing for and their differences?

There is no need to post the same question twice, especially in the same forum.
Regarding what you can find with Google, an overly simplified or out of date treatment of the topic may lead you to the wrong conclusions. For example, the DoD 5220-22M standard is obsolete (& never recommended a 7 pass erase to begin with) & the 35 pass erase was intended for old, pre-2001 drives.
For modern ATA drives like you will find in any Mac capable of running Snow Leopard, one or at most a few zero data passes will do all any software-based secure erase method can do.
If you need verification of that, refer to the Epilogue section of Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory, the seminal paper on the subject by the author of the 35 pass method.

Disk Utility Erase Free Space Option Nonexistant

Have an iMAC 1 GHZ PowerPC G4 256 MB DDR SDRAM OS 10.3.9. According to various google results I should be able to call up Disk Utilities>Partition>Erase>Erase Free Space. Its not there. (Its exactly where it should be on a nearby G5 running 10.5.8.).
It will allow me to erase the entire disk or either of two partitions but the Erase Free Space isn't just grayed out, it is completely missing.
1) The hard drive was partitioned at some point in the past I think to get around some admin thing. One partition has 51 out of 60 GB filled, the other has 12.4 of 16.3 GB filled.
2) Don't ask about the admins, my Entourage has been broken for 9 months - I am not joking.
3) My computer knowledge is spotty - you've been warned.
Help!

Try starting the iMac in Target Disk Mode while attached to one of your newer computers with a firewire cable. This basically makes the iMac an external hard drive. I've not tried this but you should then be able to use a newer version of Disk Utility on that drive.
[How to use FireWire target disk mode|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661] includes description of hardware and software requirements.
[What to do if your Mac doesn't enter FireWire Target Disk Mode|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75414], also read about [Open Firmware Password Protection|http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/openfirmwarepassword.html] which can disable Target Disk Mode.
I'm not a technician but I don't think it "misses" areas, it's just more a matter of covering up what was written there before. Think of it as you write something on a piece of paper, then erase it and write something down in the same space. If you look closely you can see what was written there before. Now erase that again and write something else. It'll be pretty difficult to make out what was written there the very first time. Do that 7 times and it will be very, very, very difficult. Do that 32 times and it will be impossible. However, all that erasing and writing will take its toll on the paper and take a long time. I'd say anything more than a erase once would really have to be justified by very sensitive data. Anybody wanting to recover the data would have to use pretty specialized equipment.

Re: Disc Utility & Free Space

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