can anyone tell me how to reformat my computer

[traceypsu]

Im fairly new to mac computers and i have a power book g4 and it says that i have used approx. 57.27 gb of the 74 gb that are on there. I cant figure out how i used that much space and i tried getting rid of programs, pictures, videos, anything i could to get some space back..but nothing is working.Im not sure if i deleted things wrong ( i thought that i could just throw the program in the trash to delete them) Was that wrong? Do i now need to reformat my computer and how would i do it because im afraid of messing up my computer it i try to figure it out myself.

please please please help..someone

[John A]

Assuming you've got precious data on your Mac, I would say you should start by backing up the data. If it's a relatively small amount of data that you need to backup, you can simply burn it on a blank CD/DVD. Or if you have a network, you can back it up on another machine.

Now that you're ready to wipe everything, I would suggest the best thing to do is follow my guide to reinstalling Tiger. Make sure you choose the "Erase+Install" option when installing, and it will automatically reformat your hard drive.
http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread54207.html

Hope this helps

[Danarchy]

Im fairly new to mac computers and i have a power book g4 and it says that i have used approx. 57.27 gb of the 74 gb that are on there. I cant figure out how i used that much space and i tried getting rid of programs, pictures, videos, anything i could to get some space back..but nothing is working.Im not sure if i deleted things wrong ( i thought that i could just throw the program in the trash to delete them) Was that wrong? Do i now need to reformat my computer and how would i do it because im afraid of messing up my computer it i try to figure it out myself.

please please please help..someone

Just curious.
Which Mac operating system are you using?
I just wiped my eMac clean. Well, Apple did. But I had a hard time backing up my hard drive (3 times it didn't give acceptable results), so I had to drag everything to my external hard drive.
I didn't get a 'disk image' on the first try and got one on the second and third try, but they were too small to be a full copy.
I was using Disk Utility as suggested by a friend.

Good luck and welcome to Macs!
Dan

eMacs: 700Mhz and 1024Mhz, Gig RAM & OS X3.8 (waiting for Leopard after it has been on the market for a few months)

[Dani]

After moving items to your trash, you have to empty the trash bin before the items will be deleted off of hte drive and space recovered.

[Lomoco]

Try using Disk Inventory X. Download it from here: http://www.derlien.com/ . It shows a map of your hard-drive with colors for kinds of files. Check it out. You probably have some 1GB movies out there. Compress them with iMovie

[debbyisanana]

just wanted to say thx, i have just relocated, have pc issues on top of it and couldnt find
the "code" per "wipe out" of my hard drive..

for no apparent reason i cant get my pc to find the tcp/ic, found the sql server stuff, however
it wont start either, so i guess its wipe out time,, its all good, been here done that, even tho
i hate to..

just couldnt find the paper i wrote how to do it on,, still packed possibly..
my hat goes off to all you folks who know all this stuff, i find it by trial and error.

thx again!

Debby