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mysteriously lost about 3GB Hard Drive space?

crazydreaming

crazydreaming

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 17, 2005
563
0
Salt Lake City, UT -Westminster College
For a few hours this afternoon, my powerbook was acting wierd. The fans were running like crazy and the only thing open was safari (a few windows), mail, and iChat. Safari was unbearably slow. When I went to activity monitor, my processor was running at almost 100%, but I couldn't find the culprit, the biggest resource hog was safari and it was only 5-10%...

Quitted everything, left computer for a while. Come back, fans still running, and message comes up saying I'm out of hard disk space. I ran onyx: all the maintenance and cleaning commands, restart and reset pram twice. I repeated this whole process twice, and I'm still only at 1GB when I had 4.5GB before all this started.

Whole thing doesn't make sense. What would be taking up all that space mysteriously??
 
Try running OmniDiskSweeper or WhatSize and looking for any large files or folders. Could be a runaway log file of some sort...

Also, when you were in Activity Monitor, did you switch the drop menu to show All Processes instead of just My Processes? If not, that may have been why you didn't see what was using up your CPU.
 
crazydreaming said:
For a few hours this afternoon, my powerbook was acting wierd. The fans were running like crazy and the only thing open was safari (a few windows), mail, and iChat. Safari was unbearably slow. When I went to activity monitor, my processor was running at almost 100%, but I couldn't find the culprit, the biggest resource hog was safari and it was only 5-10%...

Quitted everything, left computer for a while. Come back, fans still running, and message comes up saying I'm out of hard disk space. I ran onyx: all the maintenance and cleaning commands, restart and reset pram twice. I repeated this whole process twice, and I'm still only at 1GB when I had 4.5GB before all this started.

Whole thing doesn't make sense. What would be taking up all that space mysteriously??
Click to expand...

Virus.
 
dmw007 said:
Did you try to do a restart? Maybe Mac OS is using a large amount of your HDD's disk space for virtual memory?
Click to expand...

Yep...he restarted multiple times.

crazydreaming said:
I ran onyx: all the maintenance and cleaning commands, restart and reset pram twice. I repeated this whole process twice, and I'm still only at 1GB when I had 4.5GB before all this started.
Click to expand...
 
i dont know what the hardware stuff was about but if you are using bittorrent to down load a large file and forget about it (NEVER downloading all of fedora core 5 via torrent again, 4+GB) the HD forgets that it allocated the memory sometimes so it will suddenly realize its down to no storage (record was 641 kb left of my HD)
 
dmw007 said:
I looked over his posts to look for this and missed it each time.....must be time to go to bed.... :eek:
Click to expand...

Go ahead...I'll keep watch.

Sleep tight.
 
crazydreaming said:
:eek:





you're joking...




right?
Click to expand...

Well, no actually i'm not. It sounds exactly like a virus. It's eating up your hard drive space, plus doing whatever else you said was happening. Considering there are no viruses for macs..... it's perfectly possible.
 
macgeek2005 said:
Well, no actually i'm not. It sounds exactly like a virus. It's eating up your hard drive space, plus doing whatever else you said was happening. Considering there are no viruses for macs..... it's perfectly possible.
Click to expand...

I'm not familiar with any Windows viruses that act in this manner. However.. I'm confused by your statement, "Considering there are no viruses for macs..... it's perfectly possible." Perfectly possible to have a virus? When there are no viruses for Mac OS X?
 
quigleybc said:
Sometimes I'll just lose HD space...and then it will come back...no idea why...
Click to expand...

That seems to be what happened. I was going through and deleting stuff I don't need. When I emptied the trash one of the times, it took a long time, and suddenly the space I was missing was back :confused:

It's almost as if the trash wasn't emptying before even though it said it was...

Thanks for the help anyway!
 
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