i seem to have lost 35gig of disk space after deleting VMware

Diss · 20 Oct 2007 at 16:11

I set up a 35gig vista installation in vmware and have just deleted the folder but i haven't got my disk space back - have i lost it forever? or is there any way to get it back?

thanks

diss

Diss · 20 Oct 2007 at 16:20

also

is there any way to get the floder back - it didn't go into trash

and is there a program that will find the space and free it up?

thanks

diss

gumbald · 20 Oct 2007 at 16:57

Have you deleted the image file?

Diss · 20 Oct 2007 at 17:04

i deleted a folder that had a lot of 2 gig files in it - is that a 'yes'?

thanks

diss

randal · 20 Oct 2007 at 17:11

Don't the later versions of VMWare install images into My Documents or somewhere like that ? Try looking for "My Machines" under My Docs.

SiriusB · 20 Oct 2007 at 18:04

Are you sure it didn't go into the trash? And why on earth did you give it 35GB? Surely 5-10GB would have been more than enough to try Vista.

Diss · 20 Oct 2007 at 19:46

a) its not in the trash bucket
b) i was stupid

riddlermarc · 20 Oct 2007 at 20:40

VMWare probably would have defaulted to making the virtual disk to a size (such as 35gb) and pre-allocating all the disk size in advance (but splitting it into 2gb size bits). You can always try searching your hard drive for all files >2Gb?

Diss · 20 Oct 2007 at 21:26

riddlermarc said:
VMWare probably would have defaulted to making the virtual disk to a size (such as 35gb) and pre-allocating all the disk size in advance (but splitting it into 2gb size bits). You can always try searching your hard drive for all files >2Gb?

thx riddlermarc

it was the folder with all the 2 gig files that i deleted, but its worth a try - how do i do a search on file size tough?

diss

SiriusB · 20 Oct 2007 at 21:50

Normal Windows search should give you the option on filesize.

Fourstar · 20 Oct 2007 at 22:45

If the space hasn't been freed up they are probably still in a trash folder just not your ~/.Trash folder.

Moving things around ready for my Gutsy upgrade today I found it creating .Trash folders elsewhere in the file system. They were named .Trash-username so in my case .Trash-mark (might have been an underscore rather than hyphen).

To be specific I created a folder in the root directory named marktemp. This I filled with loads of subdirectories full of junk I went through organising and deleting using nautilus. Deleted files were being placed in /marktemp/.Trash-mark rather than the one in my home directory.

This should list the location of all .Trash folders

Code:

find / -name .Trash* 2>/dev/null

The 2>/dev/null stops error messages for folders your user doesn't have permission to view from being printed to the screen.

Diss · 21 Oct 2007 at 07:18

thanks fourstar

didn't fix the main problem ( as i'll explain in a sec) but it was very usefull as i found 29gig in a root/.trash directory

however i found a tool in Accessories called 'Disk Usage Analyser' and it was then easy to find a folder with 35 gig in it - as it happens i deleted the file in Thunar File Manager and it seems it stores its trash in:
.local/share/trash
as trash isn't hidden here i assume its why the original search didn't find it?

thanks to all for the help and suggestions

cheers

diss

Fourstar · 22 Oct 2007 at 16:18

Diss said:
as trash isn't hidden here i assume its why the original search didn't find it?

Looks like standardising trash folders is yet another thing linux needs to do!

The search I posted would only find things starting in ".Trash" (case sensitive too).

Glad you solved the problem and managed to find another 29Gig