My macbook apparently has a 40 gb HD?

[forrest1992]

I just bought a new macbook. White 2.0 GHz.

The HD says it has about 36 GB left, (I installed 3 gigs of stuff).

Now, is there a partition hidden somewhere, or is there somehow a 40 GB HD in my MacBook? Its not even an option on the Class 1 macbook, and mines a class 2.

Wtf? What should I do, where would a mystery partition be?

 

[dcv]

What should it have? 60GB? You can check this for yourself in System Profiler - just go to 'About this Mac' from the Apple menu and click on more info.

A 60GB drive once formatted is approx 55GB or so.

There'll probably be about 15GB worth of OS/other software pre-loaded, so after adding 3GB of your own files then 36GB free sounds about right.

 

[Josias]

OS X is a huge very advanced operating system. Printer drivers for all sorts'a printers, all this stuff. I had 39.8 GB the first time I booted my MB. I added 18 gigs of stuff, and it says I have 21 GB left. Your MB is in perfect order, but OS X takes up more than 200 MB...

 

[the rock]

Do an erase and install, remove language packages, printer drivers, additional fonts and potentially garageband/idvd and you'll save close to 15 gigs. Mac OS X basic install is something like 2-3 gigs.

 

[forrest1992]

I see.

That makes sense. I was just logging on to say that it said '55.[something] gig HD, 37 GB free' when installing airport express software, but that explains it. So it does have the 60 promised, but lots of pre-sets.

I would do the erase and install w/o garage band, iDVD, etc. but unfortunatly I bought the MacBook with one major purpose being to record my music and such. I also use my the OS in french sometimes to help learn it more than I allready do

But its all fine, 34 gigs left after installing PS CS, Office, QuarkXpress, and some other adobe stuff, which is more than enough considering I managed to do fine for 3 years on a G3 iMac w/ 6gb HD

 

[iProd]

There's this, for starters

http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/

 

[steamboat26]

can you remove the language packs without reinstalling? Or will it somehow save all the programs and data i have saved on my mini?

 

[FocusAndEarnIt]

That, in case you wonder, is an application (monolingual) that removes all languages you do not wish to keep.

EDIT: Look above your post, steamboat26.

 

[steamboat26]

Thanks but it only reclaims "several hundred megabytes?!?" I would expect to at least get 1 GB back from erasing all the languages.

 

[Spock]

Thanks but it only reclaims "several hundred megabytes?!?" I would expect to at least get 1 GB back from erasing all the languages.

Guess its a good thing the HD is easy to replace.

 

[Makosuke]

Be careful with Monolingual--if you tell it to delete all the non-Intel code on your system, it will completely break Rosetta by deleting some important parts of the OS.

Personally, since it's brand new, if you really want the space back I'd recommend doing a reinstall and just deselecting the languages you're not interested in (as well as the literally hundreds of megabytes of extra printer drivers). Same space reduction (more, since you get to lose the printer drivers you'll never touch, and you can always reinstall them later if need be), no risk. Just takes a little time and effort.

 

[California]

To OP, a 60 gig hard drive is ridiculous if you are doing music on your computer.

Get at least a 100gig (and you can go 7200rpms with it) but better get a 120gig or the new 160gig 5400rpm laptop drive for your space needs. I hear it's easy as pie to install on MacBooks.

 

[Moe]

Be careful with Monolingual--if you tell it to delete all the non-Intel code on your system, it will completely break Rosetta by deleting some important parts of the OS.

Also note with care that while several European languages are not marked for delete by default, U.S. English IS. Unchecking that, all ML picked up for me was about 200 MB. Cleaning out my mailbox picked up much more than that.

 

[xfiftyfour]

Get at least a 100gig (and you can go 7200rpms with it) but better get a 120gig or the new 160gig 5400rpm laptop drive for your space needs. I hear it's easy as pie to install on MacBooks.

but soooo expensive from what i've seen!

 

[supremedesigner]

Do an erase and install, remove language packages, printer drivers, additional fonts and potentially garageband/idvd and you'll save close to 15 gigs. Mac OS X basic install is something like 2-3 gigs.

Yes! It does help a lot! I unchecked everything EXCEPT iPhoto and iWeb. Save me a lot of gigs!

 

[tivoboy]

there is another

there is another program that does this, delingual or something like that. It says only supported to 10.3 but I have used it on my intelimac with no problem, and it saved about 1 GB of space for languages only.

no problems since then.

 

[drummerbooker14]

but soooo expensive from what i've seen!

if you upgrade from apple it is. but you can find a 100 to 200 gig hard drive for around $80

 

[JosiahPB]

Drummerbooker, could you give us some links for fairly cheap hard drives?