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Solved! Darwin 1.3.3 bug? disapperead 8-9GB disk space.

The problem described (darwin hfs+ problem) below was solved with DiskWarrior (a friendly person came by with his DiskWarrior bootable CD and the problem was solved. Before that we tried Norton, which could not find, let alone solve the problem). DiskWarrior was able to rescue several files, one was 9GB in size and contained indeed the repeating dvips information from dvips including the file it was itself writing to. DiskWarrior found several more (smaller) files that were orphaned. Two contained

open
list ^State:/Network/Global/AppleTalk$ regex
list ^State:/Network/Interface/[^/]+/AppleTalk$ regex
close
quit

I do not know what these are. The rest contained mail, so it seems that Mail.app is also leaking disk space through HFS+. Maybe these happened when Mail.app was killed by a powerdown or so (I'm guessing here).

If someone from Apple wants the DiskWarrior report, please mail me and I'll send it along. There was something about HFS+ Private Data.

Yours,

SH

PS. Diskwarrior will be ordered as soon as I get back to my desk at the office. This is a great tool (though a bit more choice in the GUI would be nice).

Begin forwarded message:

From: Sherlock Holmes <email@hidden>
Date: Thu May 17, 2001 04:08:23 PM Europe/Amsterdam
To: email@hidden, email@hidden
Subject: Darwin 1.3.3 bug? disapperead 8-9GB disk space. Help needed.

Even after running fsck in single user boot, 8-9G on my hfs+ root file system stays unavailable. In this message I will describe the symptoms, what I think has caused it. I am asking you all to help me reclaim the lost space without having to reinstall the system.

The basic facts.

[localhost:~] root# du -s -k /
6984293 /

[localhost:~] root# df -k
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s9 17714272 15046368 2667904 84% /

In other words, 15046368kB - 6984293kb = 8062075 kB missing.

What caused this? I have teTeX installed. At one point, I was running "dvips -Ppdf -G0" on the file pspicture.dvi. This process took forever. And at a certain point my disk was full. It turned out that there was already a pspicture.ps file in that same directory. I am not sure what happened exactly, but my guess is that pspicture.dvi contains \special{} PostScript instructions and that one of those instructions lets it *include* pspicture.ps. In other words, my dvips process was overwriting pspicture.ps at the same time it was including it. This runaway situation caused the files pspicture.ps to grow until the file system was full.

So, what did I do? Well, at one point I tried to kill the dvips process with "kill 15". After that I rm-ed the pspicture.ps file. Somehow, however, the disk space was not freed. Suspecting that the process was still around, I decided that I needed a reboot. So, that is what I did. Somewhere along the line, the disk was trashing heavily (really weird disk sounds).

After the reboot, 9GB of disk space was lost. As above, it is not in the file system, but it is also not available for new files. I freed a couple of GB to be able to work, but the 8-9GB stays lost. I have booted in Mac OS 9.1 and run Disk First Aid there, but without any positive results. I tried running the scanning for bad sectors with Drive Setup. This failed with some unexpected error.

My guess is that somehow it has been possible for this disk space to end up in a limbo between the allocated and free clusters, it is in neither. That, I would guess, is a darwin bug. Or maybe, this whole process is just coincidence and there are suddenly 8GB bad sectors on the disk, but how do I find out about that?

One more item of interest. Booting single user and fsck doesn;t solve a thing. But there is a difference between both situations. In single user mode the math is:
15046364-5185669=9860695, or in other words, in single user mode 9GB is missing and logged in 8GB is missing. Has the swap file maybe something to do with it? It gets removed and recreated at multi-user startup.

So, what next? Reinstalling the OS is an option, but I would really love to prevent that (if only because I do not have a good backup mechanism under OS X). So, if any technical guru can help me find out what can be done about this, I would be very happy.

SH



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