Hard Drive acting up...

My hard drive is acting up....I have a 320Gig on an iMac running Mountain Lion 10.8
Suddenly my HD is loosing space dramatically.  I can see the capacity just rising as I watch it in Get Info.  I know I have about 1 gig available, but then suddenly it willd dwindle down to Zero letting me know my HD has no room.  Then it will come back, and slowly work its way back up to 1 gig.  Now it's in between 640 and 675 MB available..
Anyway experience this.?  It's an older iMac Mid 2007

Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions
Boot from your Leopard Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list.  In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive.  If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer.
If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.
How much space do you believe you should have available? I would restart the computer into Safe Mode to see if the problem stops. If not, then create a new admin user account. Log into this new account and see if the problem stops.

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