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TICKET ARCHIVE -> computer's hard disk (Tiger)

juliang - Feb 3, 2006 - 1:36 am

What is the Volume Catalog Info file? One of my Macs has one that is 12GB, which is untenable. How can I get rid of it or make it a reasonable size?

skapp - Feb 3, 2006 - 2:52 am

Where is this file found? Are you sure it's an OS X file or one generated by some third-party software you have installed? Perhaps an unerase program or other file recovery application?

juliang - Feb 3, 2006 - 3:17 am

I found it at "/Volume Catalog Info" using DiskSurveyor, because it doesn't show up with "ls -a". I'm not running any file recovery software. That Mac just has Tiger and a bunch of games and MSOffice. It was just upgraded to Tiger about two weeks ago, but I don't know when the file was created/updated, and can't find out because the system won't let me see it.

skapp - Feb 3, 2006 - 12:00 pm

How about search software? I cannot find such a file or folder on my system either visible or invisible. When you install Tiger did you do an Upgrade install? Could this item be left over from an earlier OS X installation? Maybe from software you no longer use?

What do you mean by "the system won't let me see it?" Is it an invisible file? If you use the Terminal can you list it specifically, i.e., ls -a "Volume Catalog Info"? Does DiskSurveyor tell you anything about the kind of file? Are there creation and modification dates for the file?

Did you ever have Norton Untilities or SystemWorks installed? Have you tried putting the file in the Trash (not deleting it) then restarting to see if anything happens?

juliang - Feb 3, 2006 - 9:37 pm

Spotlight doesn't find the file, and "ls -a" doesn't find it. The only software I have that shows it is DiskSurveyor. Is there some other software I can try looking with? I didn't even notice the existence of this file until it got obnoxious. Now I'm finding it on other Macs, in both Tiger and Panther.

I installed Tiger as an Upgrade Install. The file might be left over from before; without some other way to look at it I can't tell when it got created. DiskSurveyor tells file information, but for this one it's showing what looks like underscores for the type and creator. For the date it only shows modify date, which doesn't help.

It looks like the name might actually be "Volume Catalog Info*".

I've never used Norton or SystemWorks or anything else. I can't put the file in the trash because nothing will give me access to it.

After some more hardcore googling, I found a note that says it's not really a file, it's just DiskSurveyor showing how much space is being used for the system directory structures. That doesn't make it any better though, because it's showing 12GB on a 40GB disk, which is an absurd amount of space for directory structures. Maybe it's time to do DiskWarrior on that computer.

skapp - Feb 3, 2006 - 10:01 pm

I did a little checking myself and Disk Surveyor seems to be an obsolete or non-existent program. It is not on versiontracker or macupdate. A Google search turned up a listing for it but the program was no longer available. It sounds to me like this may be a utility you should not be using on an OS X disk. As best I can tell from searching Disk Surveyor should not be usable with OS X. OS X 10.0 was released in March 2001. That is the last year for which I can find any reference to Disk Surveyor on Google.

juliang - Feb 6, 2006 - 2:43 am

I wrote to the developer of DiskSurveyor and he sent me a beta copy of an updated app; it's not indicating much different, unfortunately. It's like you said, it just can't be used at this point. Too bad, nothing else does as nice a job. I guess it's back to du. Thanks for the help.

skapp - Feb 6, 2006 - 2:52 am

What exactly does Disk Surveyor do that you want to have available in OS X. Perhaps there are other utilities you can use.

juliang - Feb 6, 2006 - 3:12 am

Graphical display of disk usage in a directory, as pie charts or bar charts. It's a terrific way of very quickly seeing what's using up disk space. You can drill down in the display to get more detail from any directory, and quickly open one to get rid of files. Have you come across anything else like that?

skapp - Feb 6, 2006 - 10:42 am

Actually there are tons of such utilities for OS X. I can't give you specific names, however. I use a menubar utility called MenuMeter which just displays space information in a menubar item (along with other displays such as memory, cpu usage, network info.) However, there are numerous utilities with functions much like what you describe. Search for them at www.versiontracker.com. I'm sure you will find something similar.

You are aware that simply CTRL-clicking on any drive icon will allow you to navigate through the drive hierarchy via the contextual menu?

juliang - Feb 7, 2006 - 7:36 pm

I haven't seen anything that matches the graphical output that DiskSurveyor produces. I've put up a sample image at http://www.advisoryfinancial.com/Picture1.png You can start its scan anywhere in the filesystem hierarchy, zoom in on any bar in the display, and open the folder associated with each bar segment. I use MenuMeters also, but you can see it's nothing like this.

> You are aware that simply CTRL-clicking on any drive icon will allow you
> to navigate through the drive hierarchy via the contextual menu?

How do you do that? The menu I get doesn't show any navigation command except Open.

skapp - Feb 7, 2006 - 11:06 pm

I'm simply CTRL-clicking on the drive icon. If it doesn't work for you, maybe I have a third-party CMM providing that - QuickAccessCM (versiontracker.com.)

I know there are a lot of disk utilities in the free/shareware library. You may have to do some downloading and trying out to find something you like. There are also a lot of system status utilities that include modules to display disk data. I don't really find a need for them, but do some exploring in the versiontracker.com and macupdate.com libraries. You're sure to find something satisfactory.