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blue&whiteman

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Nov 30, 2003
1,210
0
I have a 120GB hard disk with 75GB free yet I keep getting odd error messages saying the my drive is full. Any ideas?

Here is a small shot of it, you can see my panther file browser window behind it showing the 75GB free.
 

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Makosuke

macrumors 604
Aug 15, 2001
6,661
1,242
The Cool Part of CA, USA
No, your problem is almost certainly NOT what that MacFixIt article is talking about. The problem in that case would still only occur when the HD was full, which your screenshot indicates yours is not (not to mention the fact that filling 75GB of HD space with VM swap files would mean there was some application going absolutely berserk eating up RAM, and you'd be hearing a huge amount of disk activity).

The MacFixIt report was just commenting that a lot more paging tends to happen under Panther (which I haven't really experienced), but it's still just regular paging.

I'm assuming that it is indeed your startup partition with the 75GB free, in which case the problem is just weird.

Try running Activity Monitor, and watching the tab for RAM use (or just checking out what processes are using how much RAM), and see what's going on the next time that problem occurrs. Panther handles low HD situations much better than Jaguar, so corruption dosen't occur when swap files fill your boot partition (which happened to me several times), and maybe the trigger limit on your computer got screwed up somehow (that is, it panics on 75GB free instead of 75MB or something).

Also, out of curiosity, how much RAM do you have?
 

blue&whiteman

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Nov 30, 2003
1,210
0
512MB. it says in my signature :)

turns out I had a corrupt disk. I booted from one of my other drives and ran a Drive 10 volume structure test/fix and now all is fine. turns out I had the wrong jumper settings on it so my data was comming in all messed up. DOH!

thanks for all your advice anyway. all is well now :)
 

superbovine

macrumors 68030
Nov 7, 2003
2,872
0
it is possible to run out of swap space even though you hard drive is not full. most operating system won't every try and allocate you entire hard drive for virtual memory.

Originally posted by Makosuke
No, your problem is almost certainly NOT what that MacFixIt article is talking about. The problem in that case would still only occur when the HD was full, which your screenshot indicates yours is not (not to mention the fact that filling 75GB of HD space with VM swap files would mean there was some application going absolutely berserk eating up RAM, and you'd be hearing a huge amount of disk activity).

The MacFixIt report was just commenting that a lot more paging tends to happen under Panther (which I haven't really experienced), but it's still just regular paging.

I'm assuming that it is indeed your startup partition with the 75GB free, in which case the problem is just weird.

Try running Activity Monitor, and watching the tab for RAM use (or just checking out what processes are using how much RAM), and see what's going on the next time that problem occurrs. Panther handles low HD situations much better than Jaguar, so corruption dosen't occur when swap files fill your boot partition (which happened to me several times), and maybe the trigger limit on your computer got screwed up somehow (that is, it panics on 75GB free instead of 75MB or something).

Also, out of curiosity, how much RAM do you have?
 
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