low space on hard drive and now macbook pro wont boot

[kevinburgh]

I let my hard drive capacity run down to 7gb on my 500gb internal. Not smart. The macbook pro running snow leopard would not boot up, got stuck on the apple screen with the spinning wheel below it. I can access the internal hard drive through an external boot but the external boot(10.4.11) is not up to date. Also not smart, as is so very clear now. It wont do a safe boot and when I tried re-installing snow leopard it said it could not install because of an error. I was about to try an archive and install from the original dvd(10.4.5) that came with the macbook but "Preserve Users and Network Settings" was dimmed out so I cancelled that idea for the moment. I also tried freeing up more space on the internal hard drive(over 100gb) and that hasn't helped either. Now I'm backing up everything on the internal harddrive. Any suggestions on the best route to take at this point? Is there anyway I get things back to their pre-crash state?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Do you have a Time Machine or other backup?
Btw, "memory" is not the same as "hard drive capacity":
What is Computer Memory? RAM vs Hard Drive
RAM vs. Hard Disk

 

[kevinburgh]

Thanks for the ram/hard disk correction. I do have a backup but it is a bit outdated. The backup is running 10.4.11. I was running 10.6.7 when the problems occurred.