|
Mac GeekeryGet your geek on. |
|
blog advertising is good for you
recent popular content
User login
|
Sometimes, when using the erase free space function of Disk Utility, the process will be interrupted by a crash, hang, power outage, or small mammal urinating on the power supply. Should this happen, you’ll find that your disk has suddenly lost the majority of its free space and nothing you do in the GUI will show you where it is. No amount of checking the disk will bring it back, because it’s not a catalog problem. Disk Utility accomplishes the erase feature by creating large sparse image files in a preset directory. It then deletes them with the There are a variety of ways of doing this, but I’ll cut to the chase and give you the answer. The files are created in /var/root/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems and are sequential variations of the name sudo rm -f /var/root/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/*
About Adam Knight
 Author Biography Adam Knight is one of the founders of Mac Geekery and is a geek at heart. Programmer by day, hacker by night, his daily life revolves around the Macintosh platform, which he has been a user and programmer for since the early days of System 7 when his LCII replaced his Apple //c. In-between tech jobs, he’s managed to learn the basics of any web hacker: PHP, MySQL, Perl, Apache, Linux, *BSD, and the intricacies of ./configure —prefix=~/bombshelter/. Today, codepoet is concentrating on blogging again, writing some software for the Mac by himself (including Notae) and for his company (such as Switchblade) and has a few other toys coming out soon. Bug him over AIM or email [link fixed]. |
The location of the sparseimage file given in the above tip is only
correct if you’re erasing free space on the boot drive. If you’re erasing
free space on another volume, the sparseimage(s) can be found here:
/Volumes/YourVolume/.TemporaryItems/folders.UIDNumber/TemporaryItems/
Where “YourVolume” is the name of the volume being erased, and “UIDNumber”
is the UID number of the user performing the erase.
-systemsboy
Hi Adam
I’ve run into this problem and haven’t a clue what to do. I’m planning to sell my G5 and wanted to do a secure erase, so set it up to do 7 zero outs in Disk Utility Options. It all started nicely, saying it would take around five hours. I went to bed while it was doing this and got up to find it hanging: the five-hour notification had disappeared but something was clearly still going on. When nothing further happened, I figured I could do without Fort Knox security and clicked Skip. Well, now, a couple of hours later, it’s still “skipping” – that’s what it says – and there’s no noticeable reduction in the bar. If I go to the Disk Utility menu and try Quit, I get a window saying that Disk Utiliy still has some operations in progress and, rather more ominously, that “quitting in the middle of some operations can leave a disk non-operational”. Point is, I’ve already deleted everything on the disk, so what can I do to get where I want to go and leave the 250 GB disk in pristine condition for the next owner.
Any help appreciated
Michael
i was interrupted due to a black out and i logged back in and found myself with little to no memory. out of panic i did the erase free space again and waited until it completed but my memory is still low. what do i do?
systemsboy,
thank you very much. You really made my day. I “lost” 20 GB during the “erase free space” procedure when a power outage occured.
The location of the EFTFile1.sparseimage is so hidden, hidden, hidden… and then I had to “sudo bash” to get into that directory. A user with no terminal experience cannot kill the sparseimage file, right? Macs just work…
Thank you again, dear systemsboy
Roman
I don’t understand how to delete the sparse image file, I ran disk utility erase free space and it made no difference to my available GB, however looking at omni disk sweeper I see there is a temporary file – etf file1 temporary file sparse image which is 9.5 GB, it’s under a folder marked private, how do I find this folder to delete it?
very easy… and no data lost!!!
1. create a boot-camp partition with boot camp applicaton (dont install Windows)
2. restart your mac
3. start boot camp again and select the option to delete boot-camp partition
———————
that’s all — you have your entire diskspace back – no Free Space left
right, i have just tried to erase free space on my imac, it all started fine, later on came back to find all my hard disk was being used up to create a new folder (to move everything into, so it could erase everything else. i guess) so what i did was to go through some of my folders and delete some old work that i didnt need, as i did this the computer just used what ever memory i kept freein up. When i cudnt free no more and it was obviously not doin nothin else i decided to skip the rest. It took a while to do this command and then a sign sayin i needed to restart my computer appeared, ok i thought, did this but as it all loads up with the white screen with the apple logo, this restart message keeps appearin and not goin away. Can neone help? Have i broken it? :S