Startup disc full

[mcooke]

This happened before and I deleted a bunch of junk I had piled on the computer over the years and it was fine. Now I have this. Says my hard drive is completely full of "other"
... What do I do?????

 

[GGJstudios]

If you're wondering what "Other" category in the storage tab is about, this may help explain:

What is this "Other" in the storage tab? What is eating my space​

For space issues not explained by the above, there are a few things you can try, some of which may or may not apply:

• Begin by restarting your computer as a first step. This sometimes resolves issues.
• For Time Machine users on notebooks running Lion or later, space may being consumed by Time Machine local snapshots, which can be disabled by entering the following command in Terminal: sudo tmutil disablelocal.
  About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs​
• Check to see if some of the space is being used by your sleepimage file.
• Search with Finder to see if the space is being consumed by a very large file or several large files. Adjust the 50GB in the illustration to whatever size you deem appropriate.
  
• Use OmniDiskSweeper, JDisk Report, Disk Inventory X, DaisyDisk or GrandPerspective to see how space is being used on your drive. Some of these apps may show more detail than others, so try several.
• Check your drive with Disk Utility: Using Disk Utility to verify or repair disks
• Try re-indexing your drive: Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes

Here are a few resolutions found by others with the same question:

• Encrypted drive
• Time Machine backup files and needed disk repair
• App filling log file
• App or file was 89GB
• Drive needed to be re-indexed
• Time Machine backup file
• Large app cache file
• Garageband files and video podcasts
• Oversized email being duplicated
• Another email issue
• 18.45EB of movies shown

Freeing up drive space in Mac OS X

 

[Weaselboy]

This happened before and I deleted a bunch of junk I had piled on the computer over the years and it was fine. Now I have this. Says my hard drive is completely full of "other"
... What do I do?????

That readout comes from the Spotlight index and it appears your is corrupt. Run the command below in Terminal to reindex Spotlight then see what it shows.

sudo mdutil -E /

If you look at space available in Finder what does it show?

 

[mcooke]

It says 0 is available. 0 in every category except for Other. This is rather annoying

 

[Weaselboy]

It says 0 is available. 0 in every category except for Other. This is rather annoying

Is that after reindexing Spotlight using the command I posted?

 

[maflynn]

Download and use OmniDiskSweeper. It will provide a sorted list of what's consuming your space.

The storage display in the About This Mac is not precise enough for you to gain any information.

Run the Disk Utility and see if there's any errors on the drive as well.