Hard Drive doesn't add up

[Mroczka]

Hi

I'm stumped. I recently bought an external drive to back up my Powebook G4 which has a 120G internal upgraded hard drive. As I was backing up, something went haywire. Now my internal drive says it is nearly full...yet all the folder sizes only add up to about half that size. I've fixed permissions, run disk utility, nothing is fixing the problem. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thank you.

 

[Sheetmetal]

Back up you stuff and I would erase the drive and try again. When it went haywire, part of the drive may have become unusable.

Also, don't some Powerbooks have a physical limit on hard drive storage?

 

[Mroczka]

Thanks for the suggestion. I did some research and discovered a hidden volume on my internal drive from a previous attempt at restoring from an external drive that died. It was a complete copy of my drive. I deleted it and now I've got my space back and everything adds up.

I discovered this volume by doing this...I found at Mac Fit it:

"Sometimes, backup programs that cannot find an intended destination (or target) volume for a backup create a folder with the same name as the destination, and put the folder into the /Volumes directory. There are cases in which the entire startup volume has been backed up on itself, in a folder inside /Volumes. If the amount of missing space is about the size of your user folder, such a backup is likely to be the explanation. If you use Carbon Copy Cloner or another backup or cloning utility and have its preferences configured to create a backup on a schedule, and the intended destination volume is not mounted or is sleeping at the scheduled time, the backup is created in the /Volumes directory.

To check the size of the normally invisible /Volumes directory on the active startup volume, open a new Finder window. Select the startup volume in the list at the left, then choose column view (the one at the right of the three views). From the Finder’s Go menu, choose Go to Folder, and paste in:

/Volumes

The /Volumes directory becomes visible in the Finder"