Mac won't recognize full hard drive capacity (MacBook G5)

oliver23 · Oct 5th, 2008, 09:54 AM

I have a MacBook G5 with Intel Core Duo running Mac OS X Leopard. 4 months ago my hard drive died i took it into the local apple authorized reseller (iService Depot) and had the drive replaced. Everything worked great. Now 4 mpnths later my hard drive is not working so great, or perhaps the Operating System (Leopard). My MacBook boots with no issues it will beging running just like it would normaly run. But a message will appear saying the starup disk is full. I know this is not true I have not filled 230 Gigs so i ignore it. But just to be sure i check what disk utility says, and disk utility says it has 196 Gigs left. I decided to check finder (at the bottom of finder it says how much space is left.) Finder at first said there was 22 Gigs left but in a matter of seconds the number changed to 0 Kb then it jumps up to 1,008 Mb (I thought there must be something wrong at this point why would finder keep saying diffrent numbers and I have never seen finder display 1,000 Mb why not just 1 Gb) it continued to display random sizes while disk utility gave a steady 196 availible! The mac runs at the same speed it normally would but sometimes it won't start some applications and complains about disk space when starting apps. I then did another test i put the MacBook into Target disk mode and hooked it up to my Mac Mini, I mounted the macbook and used get info on the Mac Mini and the mac mini confirmed 196 Gigs availible.
Whats going on help please!!!???!!!

eMacMan · Oct 6th, 2008, 12:04 AM

A bit of confusion here. There is not and never has been a G5 laptop. MacBooks all have Intel chips of one variety or another.

By any chance have you activated "FileVault"? FileVault has always been problematic. There are safer ways to encrypt critical data.

chas_m · Oct 7th, 2008, 04:24 AM

[QUOTE=oliver23;736749]I have a MacBook G5 with Intel Core Duo running Mac OS X Leopard. 4 months ago my hard drive died i took it into the local apple authorized reseller (iService Depot) and had the drive replaced. Everything worked great. Now 4 mpnths later my hard drive is not working so great, or perhaps the Operating System (Leopard). My MacBook boots with no issues it will beging running just like it would normaly run. But a message will appear saying the starup disk is full. I know this is not true I have not filled 230 Gigs so i ignore it. But just to be sure i check what disk utility says, and disk utility says it has 196 Gigs left. I decided to check finder (at the bottom of finder it says how much space is left.) Finder at first said there was 22 Gigs left but in a matter of seconds the number changed to 0 Kb then it jumps up to 1,008 Mb (I thought there must be something wrong at this point why would finder keep saying diffrent numbers and I have never seen finder display 1,000 Mb why not just 1 Gb)

You may be misreading Disk Utility. I think it's telling you what your CAPACITY is, not your space remaining. The Finder is telling you that.

To go from 22GB to 0 to 1GBish left sounds like you have a temp file problem. I could give you a lot of possible ways to address this, but if you want to spare yourself a lot of wasted time and headache, just back up your drive to an external, nuke and pave the boot drive, install a fresh new copy of the system it came with, restore from your backup, then update to the latest version. This should take you an hour or two tops.

You might want to download the free Grand Perspective and have a look to see what's eating your disk space, but only if you're really curious. The nuke and pave will take care of the problem.

PS. As to "why is it telling me 1,008 MB available instead of 1GB," it's because only advertising people believe that 1000MB=1GB. In reality, it's 1024MB=1GB.