Startup Disk Full! Help Me Please !

[helen21a]

Hi everyone.

I'm a fairly naive mac user and got my friend to instal my new harddrive.

It's big, with 320GB.

However, he set up a startupdisk partition, with a size of 20GB, called OSX.

For some reason this is now full and slowing down my MAC which is particularly annoying as I have college essays to submit very soon!

I've checked what is on my startupdisk and it is as follows:

Private 8GB
Applications 5GB
Library 3.5GB
System 2.3GB

I don't understand what this means but I have copied applications, library and system to my HD and tried to delete off startupdisk but it won't let me. say it is require by mac.

Hope someone can advise me!!

Thanks

helen

 

[robbieduncan]

Backup all his data. Make sure you have installers for apps etc. Wipe the drive back to one partition (or one for OSX and one for Windows if using Bootcamp). Reinstall and restore the data you backed up. 20Gb is just too small.

 

[riscy]

Indeed, 20GB is ridiculously small - maybe he meant to make it 200GB which would make more sense. As the previous poster said,back up and reformat is the way to go.