I have a 40 GB hard drive installed with Mac OS X 10.4.11. Attached to my hard drive via usb is my portable WD Passport 250 GB where I kept all of my bit torrent files. Azureus crashed this morning and the status said "error: files missing" so I deleted some of the files and I restarted the computer. Once the computer was rebooted, my disk space went down from 20 GB to 222 MB. I did a search and only 17 GB is accounted for. 22 GB is missing or invisible? What's going on??? How can I get back the 22 missing GB or restore my computer to an earlier point on Mac? Thanks for any help in advance!
error..files missing.. means you have renamed them or moved them have you tried restarting az again after a reboot to see what is going on, or are mac users like doze users and rely on their proprietary software to do their thinking? The file space has been allocated but not used.. if you try writing to it (or looking for hidden or .tmp files) it will still be there. proper *nix systems don't just lose drive space.. it will be used by files, allocated for upcoming writes or be available...
varnull, Actually, the problem came up after I did a reboot. I had deleted large files on Azureus and it went into the "Trash" bin and then I emptied the trash. I rebooted and when the computer was up, it showed that I only had 222 mb left. How do I make files that are "invisible" visible so that I could properly dispose of the unwanted files and free up my hard drive? Thanks for any help you can advise.
I solved the mystery! After some researching on afterdawn and on how to use GNU/Linux, I finally discovered what happened. My computer made an invisible drive with the same name as my external drive but I couldn't see it so in order to make it visible, I had to open up a Terminal shell and type in the following command: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool YES ...after deleting the virtual drive, my hard drive had more space. Yay!!!
That's really weird.. I wonder why osx did that instead of just reallocating the empty space. There is more to this than it seems.. possibly a bug in osx related to usb drive allocations.. do apples use a hive type registry or something which stores drive used/free and when it does not find an external device allocates hdd space instead for the upcoming (though deleted) writes.. Your command line thing is proprietary apple only style.. It's a nice way for a virus/malware writer to gain a backdoor too... hidden partition created itself.. that's grim. I haven't ever seen a *nix system behave like that before.. thanks for the info.. If I feel like a puzzle sometime I will investigate further.
