Trouble - please help

[Monty]

Hi all,

Powerbook Pro. Bought brand new five years ago ('06) 80 gig drive.
Still running Tiger 10.4.1

Small issue has caused large problems...

Was running sweet and nice and suddenly today had trouble with iPhoto.
Wouldn't (and couldn't) see or load the library which is stored on an external
Lacie drive. Has been working well this way for years.. So today I dragged the iPhoto library from the external drive into the main iPhoto window and the Mac asked me if I wanted to import all the photos. I said "yes" and it took three hours.

Sheeesh !

At the end an error message popped up with a warning that I had filled the start up disc and should delete some files.

I look at the start up disc and cannot understand how it is filled. (see pic attached). I cannot find the pictures or library that has been imported (no matter how I search) and the Mac has gone into a massive "go slow" mode.

On the one hand the displayed contents of the drive don't come anywhere near to filling it up.
On the other hand, disc first aid says it's close to full.

What have I done ?
Where can I go from here because yesterday the HD had at least 30 gig available free space.

ALL and ANY advice VERY MUCH appreciated.

best wishes
Monty

PS: you can see from the pic that only 1.63GB is available - but that the drive SHOULD leave a lot more free space.

 

[Greenman]

Have you looked under your account/pictures/iphoto library !

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

Yeah, probably telling iPhoto to copy all your pics from the external to your Mac's internal HD wasn't too good an idea ... for future reference, only copy small amounts instead of large amounts, as this way you have better control of your Mac and can easily stop the huge bottle-neck that has occurred.

Figuring out what the problem is re: iPhoto & your ext HD aside, I would advise you download the free to try "What Size" ... it will tell you where all your files are and what size they are. In the trial version, it only measures up to 20GB but that's pretty much good enough for cased like yours.

Link to WhatSize website

When I recently found my iMac's 250GB drive was nearly full I used "What Size" to see if I could delete stuff and it found an 8GB iMovie project file sitting on my Desktop TOTALLY invisible!! So straight away I gained 8GB ... don't know how that happened.

So, try using that app to help free up space but be careful not to delete important System Files .. ask here first if not sure ...

With the ext HD, it's quite possible that the alias of the iPhoto Library on the ext drive wan't working anymore and it may just have been the case of launching iPhoto while holding down the Option key which brings up the following window:



Click for large view - Uploaded with Skitch


Then hopefully your external drives iPhoto Library will be displayed there ... of course make sure your ext Drive is connected. Also the USB cable may be faulty or the USB Port may also be faulty in either your Mac or the Ext Drive.

 

[Monty]

Aha - I love learning those "launch with this or that key" tricks - worked perfectly.
Now to try "WhatSize" to clean up - and then to sort out using "Target mode" to do a clean
install of Tiger from my old Powerbook G4 as the Superdrive on the MacBook Pro has gone South.
Thanks for all those tips.
Best wishes
Monty

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

Please let us know how everything goes, Monty