Drive claiming that it's full

Hi...a friend's laptop is claiming that his drive is full. I've checked, and as far as I can see, he only has slightly over 5GB on it...including system, etc. Should have tons of free space. I've done Disk Uitilty, fsck, and nothing seems to clear the memory. I brought one of my DiskWarrior disks to try that, but, of course, his won't read a DVD. So I'll have to try one on a CD tomorrow.
Any other ideas? He only uses it to work on online Report Cards (he's a teacher) and create worksheets for the kids. Doesn't download anything. I don't even think he uses it for email.
Obviously something's gotten corrupted.

Brian:
Can you give us the specs of the computer in question? Also the HDD total capacity, the OS, and RAM installed.
The article Where Did My Disk Space Go? describes different scenarios that might result in the too full startup disk issue.
The first thing to do is to check and see what is on the HDD. Download and run WhatSize 10.3.91 or Disk Inventory. This will scan the disk and list the contents by file/folder size. Look through the results for files that seem unusually large. Look at files/folders that you are not sure about or that seem suspicious. Look at the Console log files.
If you do not have sufficient room to download and run anything you may first need to free up some space. Dr. Smoke's FAQ Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk will help you to remove some non critical files. Post back with what you find out.
cornelius

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Hi,
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Alexander, I would like to apologize for the TERRIBLE answers you have been given so far. I too had this question, and so here is what my thoughts are, as maybe they might provide insight in leading you towards the answer.
I am a *nix user in general, and thus own a mac and a thinkpad. In fact I just got my thinkpad not too long ago. As such, I transfered my faster hard drive to my faster computer, which made logcal sense to me. Ergo, I moved my Mac drive to my lenovo. On this drive I have a hybrid mbr which is no longer needed. So my thoughts are this:
From what I gather, the UEFI standard indicates that there is to be a protective MBR on all GPT systems. This is so that when you use programs that are not GPT aware, they will see a presumably "full" drive and not think that they have the right to destroy your existing data in what it thinks is free space. For instance, fdisk or other MBR only partitioning systems. Thus, if your system has only a MBR with a single EE partition, it would be my guess that it was in fact not put there by installing Windows, but rather for the protection of your system.
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$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/disk0
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PS The command examples, the $ is to indicate it is a bash/shell command as a non-root user, do not include it in the command.

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HT1338 How do I make more room on my startup disc? I keep getting a warning that it is full.

How do I make more room on my startup disc? I keep getting a warning that it's full.

Bernie007 wrote:
How do I make more room on my startup disc? I keep getting a warning that it's full.
Try downloading omnidiscsweeper
http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnidisksweeper/
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http://www.reedcorner.net/guides/macvirus
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