After larger Startup disk was installed, I have no available disk space.

Question

I used CCC to make a bootable clone of a Mac Mini (10.5.5) 40 GB drive on to a 250 GB drive that I installed in the Mini. It boots great. However when I try to do anything that requires writing to the new larger drive I get an operating system error saying that the disk is full, please delete files to make additional space.
When I check the "Macintosh HD" in the finder it says I have 199 GB available.
What is going on?
Thanks,
Kevin

Answer 1

Perhaps the partitioning of the new larger drive was incorrectly done
or to some marginal format standard the system can't use for more files.
Hard to say what happened while cloning, recloning and restoring;
unless the event was captured on a movie others could see, with
subtitles and edits to show more detail than the first-run would tell.
Some kinds of security may limit the available volume of the drive;
so if you have something running in the System, it could mess it up.
When I make clones, there are certain things I've done, a few I've tried
and then a few new things I've learned and tried to remember next time.
If you see the new hard disk drive in Disk Utility, does it show more
than one partition; and what does it say about the format type or
the status if Verified? Have you booted the computer from the Installer
disc and ran Disk Utility from there and have it Repair Disk?
There is a chance you may have to do some work on the new HDD
and see if the results change. If the drive was repaired and prepared
prior to the installation of OS X, it should just work. If the format is not
correct, perhaps the file system is not right for your configuration.
Sorry to say that I have no magic answer; and if the situation were
mine, I'd hope to have a second source for a new clone (the old HD)
and that, in an enclosure, would supply the next attempt in cloning.
My clones are usually from healthy re-repaired, updated, permissions
repaired, disk repaired, etc. & good full-computer-content clones result.
And at times, I make sure the latest version of CCC is used, and the
target drive is pre-erased, zero-overwritten and reformatted correctly.
Even a new drive can have issues, and may not be working right.
Hopefully someone with this kind of glitch experience will reply; my
experiences include wrong merging of system files, processor up-
grades that ran fine from a system but wrote incorrect code to the
software, so the hard drive would not work again, after shutdown;
and other joys. Some best forgotten after 140 Mac repair/restores.
Good luck & happy computing!