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I'm new to Mac. I have deleted many files from my applications folder, downloads, music, etc. to make clean Mountain Lion installation.

After installing Mountain Lion I can still see in
About This Mac > More info > Storage That my hard drive has 2GB+ of music files and 12GB+ of other files.

How to open my hard drive to see all files located on it and delete them e.g. like on Windows?

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possible duplicate of How can I figure out what's slowly eating my HD space? – Mark Feb 21 at 10:13

3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

You also need to empty the Trash. Right click on the Trash icon (far right of the dock) and choose Empty Trash :)

To view your hard drive, open a new Finder window. Then in the menu, click Go → Home to see your user directory. Or choose Computer to see your whole hard drive.

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I've emptied my trash, forgot to mention it. Can you explain in bit more detail how to access "Computer" I can't find it, even in spotlight... ;)) – Ilya Knaup Sep 1 '12 at 8:23
nvm found it ;)), but still doesn't seem there are any files here, I just don't understand what is taking up so much space... – Ilya Knaup Sep 1 '12 at 8:29
up vote 2 down vote

Diskwave is a really great tool to see what's taking up space on your laptop.

http://diskwave.barthe.ph/

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GrandPerspective is another good free tool that does the same thing, but shows you a diagram of your files instead of a list. Bigger files have bigger rectangles in the diagram, so it’s easy to judge how much space a file or folder is taking up. – Rory O'Kane Sep 1 '12 at 8:46
However it's really hard to see which folder takes up a lot of space, as that may be the case, which I find grandperspective to be inferior compared to diskwave. – theAmateurProgrammer Sep 1 '12 at 9:06
JDiskReport is also free. And it represents folder sizes as slices of a pie chart, which is more intuitive imho. jgoodies.com/downloads/jdiskreport – username Sep 1 '12 at 9:34
up vote 0 down vote

Use this command

for i in /Volumes/*; do sudo rm -rf "$i"/.Trashes/*; done

Finder sometimes gets stuck if e.g. a huge number of small files need to be deleted. Deleting them from Terminal is the faster way in these cases (but slightly dangerous in case of typos). If you want to reduce the risk (and just want to remove your own files)

cd; rm -rf ~/.Trashes

just cleans out your own trash.

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You could also use sudo rm -rf /Volumes/*/.Trashes/*. If other volumes are mounted, emptying the trash in Finder would usually delete files on them as well. – Lauri Ranta Sep 1 '12 at 9:05

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