Is there an easy way to see what's taking up space on my Mac HDD?

http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/

look in the downloads section there is a mac version

Brilliant - absolute champ Jase. So, as suspected, the 20Gig partition that VirtualBox created when I installed Vista didn't get removed when I uninstalled VirtualBox. Disk Utility is showing 95gig of used space, whereas Jdiskreport is showing 71gig of used space. Any ideas how to retrieve my 20gig??

Snow Leopard?

Yep.

I imagine it is the 20gb ntfs/fat partition that its created also have a look at this

http://forum.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=21504 I have a feeling its what your looking for y/n

last edited by HerbalLizard at 13:39:08 30/Dec/09

Unfortunately no luck there. Still 20Gig missing :( I've searched for .vdi files, found one, and loaded it with VirtualBox (I had to re-install VB). Virtual Box said it was only a 10Gig partition, but after then removing the .vdi with VB, I didn't get any extra space.

if you feel like getting your hands dirty, you can drop to a shell (mac key + spacebar and type in 'terminal')
then go

# cd /
# du -sh *

that will show which directories are the largest
keep going into the largest directories and doing 'du -sh *' until you find where the files are

Thanks teq - here is what it came up with:

14G Desktop
9.5G Documents
264M Downloads
1.2G Library
585M Movies
42G Music
3.9G Pictures
8.0K Public
16K Sites
4.0K java.log.5146
16K matlab_crash_dump.5146

Which totals to about 71gig plus change.

Compare this to the Disk Utility info:
Capacity : 159.7 GB (159,697,911,808 Bytes)
Available : 63.25 GB (63,246,749,696 Bytes)

Used : 96.45 GB (96,451,162,112 Bytes)

Actually, I just used Jdisk again from the root drive, and it came up with 90gig used... I'm obviously doing something wrong somewhere. Maybe I have actually used 90Gig... but I thought I checked a week ago and it wasn't anywhere near that.

you can also do

# df -h

from the terminal
that will give you what the OS really thinks it's using

oh and

# fdisk -l

to list your partitions

Have you thought about using carbon copy and imaging your drive over to something larger say 500gb?

have you tried using a windows machine?
i dont have any disk space issues with any of my windows machines

I do, windows is always hiding s*** from me in hidden recycle bins that don't empty when I empty the recycle bin. Why the f*** windows needs 11ty billion recycle bins on each drive I don't know.

I think you need to download iFiles and do an iFormat

whoop - Multiple users on your machine? Each user has their own Recycle Bin.

Sif use the recycle bin. Shift-delete is for winners.

You're just a past liver living in the past midda. I go to the future and see whether or not I'll end up deleting the file then come back and just don't put it there in the first place these days.

e:\/\/\/ disk inventory x looks suspiciously like windirstat & sequoiaview!

last edited by whoop at 04:18:51 31/Dec/09

Billy, Disk Inventory X makes a nice treemap out of your partitions, check it out, great for tracking down AWOL disk space