Macbook Pro startup disk full

You're hard drive is getting full. You need to free up space by deleting files or moving them to another HD.

Please help me toooo.... if u can?

Hi everyone,
i'm new to this forum, new to Mac ...and pretty new to the splendid, wild, liberating, terrifying world of computers in general. So please forgive me if i'm being a bit ...erm ...thick
Jeez. I can't even make the confused face into a face(?) Sigh.
Anyway, if someone here CAN help me i'd be so grateful. My e-mail is: grabyred99@hotmail.com or you can find me on fb under Rowenna Magenta Menzies (London network).

Here I go...
I have a new-ish macbook air (bought last October). It has 2gb of memory (what eva that means) and ...knowing so little, I applied car choosing criterai wen deciding on a laptop. Ie. it looks cool. Also, i'm going travelling soon and it's fabulously light/easy to carry. I thought I would be able to down-load movies from Sky and watch them when i'm staying in some flea-ridden cheap Bangkok hotel alone. (So, yeh - first surprise: stupid My sky won't even play on mac) but never mind that(!)

I have the same start up/no room on disk prob as anyone else & i'm really worried. I DON'T understand! There's nothing ON this laptop. (Well... there are quite a lot of photographs... definately less than 1000 and pretty low pix snaps) also... maybe five BBC i-player downloads...say, 3 hours of tv? Around 20 cds stored in i tunes and... less than 10 short text documents and of course the start-up programmes that came with. So how ...HOW can my disk POSSIBLY be full? If I so much as attempt to edit a holliday pic my macbook will just freeze and crash. My SHUFFLE holds more data than this - I am outraged. OUTRAGED.
...Or ...have I done something truly horrible to my poor laptop? It's quite possible.

Thanks clever people x X x X x

Ow.

The smily-frowny-bizarre faces only become faces once the msge is posted.
...Can u IMAGINE how easily I could have randomly fckd poor laptop?

Maybe you guys don't need portability. I recommend your guys to buy a Mac Pro or a few towers of 1T external hard drives.

Ok Wenna, first things first. You have too much stuff on your drive, so lets see where all the space went. Depending on which model you bought, it may not have a terribly large drive to start with.

Click once on your HardDrive icon on the desktop and press Command + I, or while the drive icon is selected choose Get Info from the File drop Down menu.

A window will open with a lot of info in it. What does it say to the right of "Capacity", "Available" and "Used"?

If your Start-Up Disk is full that means that your hard drive (where all your files are stored) has (about) >2GB of memory left. What his means is your computer will start to run slowly. This is because OS X (your operating system) requires a substantial amount of space for Virtual Memory, a type of memory which is a "virtual" version of RAM (RAM memory that is used by OS X to store frequently used data used by running applications that is only necessary when said application is running).

My advice: download Disk Inventory X http://www.derlien.com/downloads/index.html

This application will scan your hard drive and tell you exactly what is taking up all your space. Delete (then be sure to empty the trash) EVERYTHING you don't need, don't use, etc.

CAUTION: Be very very careful when doing this as you might accidentaly delete system files that are necessary for your computer to work. DO NOT delete anything that you find in folders such as /Library/ or /System/ or /Users/<yourusername>/Library

To be safe, only delete data that is in your Home folder (omitting /Library/) or Applications.

As always, backing up your computer is a smart thing to do.


Additionally any information you can post about your HD would be helpful, as darngooddesign said.

Did you try emptying the trash?

For Super-Newbies: When you delete files, music, photos, etc, they don't go away instantly, they move to the "Trash," a special folder on the right end of your Dock (the bar of icons at the bottom of the screen. These items will remain in the trash, still occupying storage space on your hard drive, until you empty the trash. To empty, first make sure there is nothing in there that you want to keep, then, in the trash window, click empty trash.

For Chaos 68

I mean 'Chaos 86' .........sorriiiii!
It actually took me a little while to notice that I had to empty the trash. Luckily, there is a little icon of a trash can with scrunched up paper in it! I empty it every day because I like the crunching noise it makes when I throw the rubbish out(!) Had no idea that the stuff in there was taking up memory though.
NB. I have also noticed that sometimes when I turn on, scrunched up paper is BACK in the basket... It wasn't causing a problem (and I just deleted it again ...yay for the crunching noise). But... might this be something to do with my lack of disk space?
Thanku for taking the time to reply to me, I really appreciate it x X x X x

check to see if it's true.
I was using utorrent and got the same message, even though my hard drive was around 50% free...
after a few weeks I figured out that it only happens when I use utorrent, I stopped using it and haven't gotten the message in weeks.

wenna said:

I mean 'Chaos 86' .........sorriiiii!
It actually took me a little while to notice that I had to empty the trash. Luckily, there is a little icon of a trash can with scrunched up paper in it! I empty it every day because I like the crunching noise it makes when I throw the rubbish out(!) Had no idea that the stuff in there was taking up memory though.
NB. I have also noticed that sometimes when I turn on, scrunched up paper is BACK in the basket... It wasn't causing a problem (and I just deleted it again ...yay for the crunching noise). But... might this be something to do with my lack of disk space?
Thanku for taking the time to reply to me, I really appreciate it x X x X x

Click to expand...

So, after emptying the trash, is your problem solved?

The easiest way to check on how much space you have left on your hard drive is to double click the hard drive on your desktop (probably called Macintosh HD) and at the bottom of the new window it will say how much space is available on that drive. You can do this with other disks too, such as external hard drives and usb thumb drives. For more detailed information on your hard drive, a folder, or anything else in the Finder, click it, then go to the File menu, and then Get Info.

for darn good design x

Hi there
Firstly thankyou so so much for your help, sooooo grateful! x
I'm trying to get the info re. disk space but when I click the icon the file menu dissapears(!) and my computer has started running really R-E-A-L-L-Y slowly and freezing up oftern :-( sob.
I guess this is because - as xodus said, the operating system needs room to work...? so I bought a memory card thingie, transferred every damn photograph and deleted them all. It took AGES! At the end of THAT I got a message saying that "the start up disk is full, please close all applications" grrr. Luckily I was reading on this site for a while before I posted (I didn't want to write a duplicate thread) and saw one from a woman getting that message, so I was calm-ish

All those trashed photos... they dissapeared but they didn't go into trash. No scrunched paper to crumple joyously in the basket. Just an empty basket.
Does that mean they are still there, eating up space?

Anyway, i'm gonna get the info re. space/remaining space... and if it's really used up i'll download the program suggested by xodus and delete-delete-delete. I'll get back to you a.s.a.p. and thanku thanku thanku! xxxxxxx

For Pika re. more portability.

I don't know... I find it really REALLY hard to believe that an entire laptop can't store a few albums in i-tubes and a couple of (temporary) documentaries down-loaded from bbc i-player. I have deleted all my photographs and (as far as I am aware) there's nothing else on here. I mean... c'mon, my i-pod LITERALLY stores more info than that!
I bought the lap top to travel with because it's light ... so towers of external storage aren't really a viable option :-( Good idea for the futute tho. If this is genuinely the vailable space capacity then Apple will be hearing from me!!!
...But I suspect that something else is going on which is why I cam here...

for Wesrk x

Oooooo.....Wesrk!
My brother in law used that (on MY computer). He was visiting and wanted to watch the episode of LOST he was missing. My Sky isn't Mac compatible so he downloaded the episode using a torrent site. The no soace msge appeared after that - so I deleted the episode and all seemed well... for a day or so (maybe until the nxt time I booted up, unsure). Does torrent do something bad? (sorry, not even sure what a torrent site IS). x X x X

hmmm. iPhoto does have it's own trash, so you won't regain space until you empty that too, but I very very much doubt that iPhoto is causing the problem. Photos are relatively small compared to anything else you might be storing. One large photo is about a tenth the size of a song in itunes, and a song in itunes is about a 30th the size of a downloaded 20 minute tv show. So don't worry about iphoto stuff, go ahead and keep that safe.

I'd say you have an abnormal problem, possibly the aforementioned torrent issue. When you start downloading from a torrent, the torrent software sets aside the space it needs to download the file into. If that software is malfunctioning in some way, it might have set aside room for 100 tv shows or something. I've never used that particular torrent program, nor had this problem, so this is pure speculation. I think it's going to be impossible for me to help you any further. You need to find a geeky friend, maybe your brother-in-law (if you trust him not to make it worse ) If there's an Apple store nearby, the geniuses there are great for stuff like this.

for darn good design and all the other brilliant peeps trying to help me...

Hi again

Capacity: 42.88 GB
Available: 15.19 GB
Used: 27.68 GB on disk

...Does this mean i'm all full up? x

for Xodus

...Just downloaded Disk Inventory. Will delete anyhing big which doesn't seem essential/suspicious. x

Thanks everyone

I really apprceiate all your time and help. I don't want to keep bothering u so i'll try to delete any (non essential) files and if that doesn't work ...i'll take it into the apple store... which is about three hours away :-(
Maybe I should just move house to somewhere with... u know... shops/people/electricity?
If I manage to sort this (or get someone else to sort it for me ) i'll let u know.
U have all been so kind! THANKYOU! Wenna X
grabyred99@hotmail.com

wenna said:

Hi again

Capacity: 42.88 GB
Available: 15.19 GB
Used: 27.68 GB on disk

...Does this mean i'm all full up? x

Click to expand...

No, this tells us you're fine. Available 15.19 GB.

It ought not be telling you the startup disk is full until you have less than 1 GB available.

Also, please don't go deleting anything if you don't know what it does. If you do, you'll probably find you computer in a much worse state than when you started.