Message saying my "start up disc is full" how can I empty it? Where is it?

My Mac displays a message that states that my start up disc is full. I dont know how to access it and delete stuff, if indeed that is what is wrong. How do I fix this? Because of this I cannot down load anything.

1. Empty the trash.
2. Open your browser and clear the history. How you do that depends on your browser. Post back please if you need help on this.
3. Go to your downloads folder and delete anything there you do not need.
To do 3. you have to look inside the hard drive. Your hard drive is here: top right of the screen.
Double click on it and click on Column mode:
Now navigate to the Downloads folder by clicking first on Users, then your name, then Downloads. (Each click will create a new column on the right.) Delete what you do not need from the items in the last column. Then empty the trash.
Note that anything you delete will be gone forever. (Else you don't gain any space.)
Please post back for more if you need it.

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ON START UP IT TELLS ME THAT MY start up disc IS FULL - HOW DO I EITHER DELETE ITEMS - FFRAG ROM WHERE ?! - OR DE

Hi
On start up it tells me that my start up disc is full - how can i either find where to delete items from it - or can you defrag as you could in windows ? Help !

For information about the Other category in the Storage display, see this support article.
Empty the Trash if you haven't already done so. If you use iPhoto, empty its internal Trash first:
iPhoto ▹ Empty Trash
Then reboot. That will temporarily free up some space. Do the same in other applications, such as Aperture, that have an internal Trash feature.
According to Apple documentation, you need at least 9 GB of available space on the startup volume (as shown in the Finder Info window) for normal operation. You also need enough space left over to allow for growth of your data. There is little or no performance advantage to having more available space than the minimum Apple recommends. Available storage space that you'll never use is wasted space.
If you're using Time Machine to back up a portable Mac, some of the free space will be used to make local snapshots, which are backup copies of files you've recently deleted. The space occupied by local snapshots is reported as available by the Finder, and should be considered as such. In the Storage display of System Information, local snapshots are shown as Backups. The snapshots are automatically deleted when they expire or when free space falls below a certain level. You ordinarily don't need to, and should not, delete local snapshots yourself.
See this support article for some simple ways to free up storage space.
You can more effectively use a tool such as OmniDiskSweeper (ODS) to explore your volume and find out what's taking up the space. You can also delete files with it, but don't do that unless you're sure that you know what you're deleting and that all data is safely backed up. That means you have multiple backups, not just one.
Deleting files inside an iPhoto or Aperture library will corrupt the library. Any changes to a photo library must be made from within the application that created it. The same goes for Mail files.
Proceed further only if the problem isn't solved by the above steps.
ODS can't see the whole filesystem when you run it just by double-clicking; it only sees files that you have permission to read. To see everything, you have to run it as root.
Back up all data now.
If you have more than one user account, make sure you're logged in as an administrator. The administrator account is the one that was created automatically when you first set up the computer.
Install ODS in the Applications folder as usual. Quit it if it's running.
Triple-click anywhere in the line of text below on this page to select it, then copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C:
sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper
Launch the built-in Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window (command-V). You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning to be careful. If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator.
The application window will open, eventually showing all files in all folders, sorted by size with the largest at the top. It may take a few minutes for ODS to finish scanning your files.
I don't recommend that you make a habit of doing this. Don't delete anything while running ODS as root. If something needs to be deleted, make sure you know what it is and how it got there, and then delete it by other, safer, means. When in doubt, leave it alone or ask for guidance.
When you're done with ODS, quit it and also quit Terminal.

Following a message saying that my Startup disc was full and advising me to delete some files, I deleted my trash but then apps started to fail. When I tried to log on again, all I got was a blank screen and a cursor. I am a Mac Book Pro virgin, help

Following a message saying that my Startup disc was full and advising me to delete some files, I deleted my trash but then apps started to fail. When I tried to log on again, all I got was a blank screen and a cursor, so I am unable to delete any more files. I am a Mac Book Pro virgin, help

How much free space do you actually have? Go to the Apple menu and select About This Mac... More Info... and click on the Storage tab. You should see something like this...
This will show you how much free space you have and what's taking up all the space on your hard drive. You may need to backup and trash some seldom used files, applications, etc. You have to drag them into the Trash and empty the trash to regain the space. A general rule of thumb is that you should have about 15% of your hard drive storage free.
Good luck,
Clinton

My Spotlight is not working. I get the message that my start up disc is full and to start deleting files. What kind of files?

I am getting a pop up message that my start up disc is full and my spotlight is not working. The message tells me that I need to delete files. My question is what files do I need to delete? And why is my Spotlight not working?

You may find this link of interest and value...
http://macmost.com/what-to-do-when-your-hard-drive-is-full.html

Ikeep getting a message that my start up disc is full and i don't know how to free up space.. also when i o to download some files i am told there is no space left to download i bought this macbook pro used an receiver no discs.. what can i do?? t

ikeep getting a message that my start up disc is full and i don't know how to free up space.. also when i o to download some files i am told there is no space left to download i bought this macbook pro used an receiver no discs.. what can i do??

You need to purchase an external drive and start moving some files to it or you can try trashing some files that you no longer need.
Download OmniDiskSweeper and see where your larger files are... you can move them to an external drive or trash them: it's up to you.
I would also begin, since it's obviously don't have backups, a backup scheme or two. See Most commonly used backup methods.
Good luck,
Clinton

My Mac Book Pro is giving me a message that the start up disk is full, how do I delete files, and what files should I be deleting

My Mac Book Pro is giving me a message that the start up disk is full, how do I delete files, and what files should I be deleting

There are several nice programs that can help you figure out what's on your computer - OmniDiskSweep, WhatSize, and DaisyDisk are the three I like. If you've had your computer for a while - and especially if this isn't your first Mac and you've been migrating from one computer to another, one of these programs can help you find files you didn't know your computer still had. For example, when I was trying to shed files to fit int a 256GB SSD, I discovered I had nearly 1GB of files in my Application Support folder belonging to programs I no longer used.
Other than that, your easy choice are music, video, and photos. They tend to be the big files. A movie will generally be at least 1.25GB, for example.

HT4101 When I connect my Nikon coolpix S9200 to the camera adaptor I get a message saying this device uses too much power, how can I overcome tis

When I connect my Nikon coolpix S9200 to the camera adaptor I get a message saying this device uses too much power, how can I overcome this?

You are probably seeing this message because the camera uses the same port to charge it. The iPad can not supply the power to charge devices from it's dock connector. Also if you use the SD card adapter you are not using up the camera's battery for transferring the photos.

My MacBook Air keeps saying the start up disc is full...but I haven't used all the memory...help

I keep getting a message to say my start disc is full and I cant understand why. I dont have a lot of things saved on it and it affecting the operating of my laptop ie, freezing/wont download new mail.
Anyone had this issue before? Any ideas whats going on?
Thanks

First, that's not Local Snapshots -- if there was only 200 MB free, any Local Snapshots had been deleted long before (they're automatically deleted to keep your drive below 80%).
If it starts shrinking rapidly again, see Where did my Disk Space go?
There are lots of possibilities, but your symptoms sound a bit like one (or both) of these:
• Something going wrong sending thousands of messages to your logs (per the yellow box in the above link). You'll need to fix whatever that is as well as delete the old log files.
• An app (or apps) with a memory leak, making OSX use ridiculous amounts of virtual memory (not listed in the link). While the space is shrinking, select Go > Go to Folder from a Finder menubar, then type /var/vm in the prompt. That will produce a list of your swap files. Those are created as needed; the first two are 67 MB, then each additional file is double the size of the previous one, so they can get pretty large. They're deleted and started over after a Restart.
(There's probably also a sleepimage file there the same size as your installed RAM. That's normal.)

My computer keeps telling me that my start-up disc is full, how do I clear up space without deleting my files?

I really don't have time to go into the Apple Store, does anyone know how to clear up some space on my start-up disc?

You might read through this.....it will mean deleteing some stuff though....
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/freeingspace.html

Suddenly it says my start up disc is full. This is what I found under console:

consule..
4/11/09 2:51:13 PM DashboardClient[770] com.mackiev.widget.researcher: illegal type passed to setPreferenceForKey: undefined
4/11/09 2:51:13 PM [0x0-0x9009].com.apple.dock[115] 2009-04-11 14:51:13.568 DashboardClient[770:10b] com.mackiev.widget.researcher: illegal type passed to setPreferenceForKey: undefined
4/11/09 2:51:27 PM World Book[773] netServiceBrowser:didNotSearch:
<NSNetServiceBrowser: 0x1096740>
NSNetServicesErrorCode = -72004;
NSNetServicesErrorDomain = 10;
4/13/09 7:46:34 AM Mail[1154] Couldn't create QTMovie object
4/13/09 9:05:23 AM Mail[1177] Couldn't create QTMovie object
Why is it telling me this?

Greetings,
Those console entries appear to be from April 13th 2009 so that would have nothing to do with the startup disk message.
It sounds like your hard drive is full. How much free space do you have?
You can check your available space by:
Click the Finder icon in the Dock (Little blue smiley face)
Go to the "GO" menu at the top middle of the computer screen near File and Edit
Click on "Home"
Look at the bottom of the Home window and it will say XX GB Available etc.
If you have any number less than 10 GB Available or so thats your issue right there.
To resolve that issue you would need to remove some of the content you've added like music, movies, or pictures, You could delete them or better yet purchase an external hard drive and copy them to that drive.
Hope that helps!

I have purchased a 3TB external hard drive. I took it to the apple store. They moved all of my iTunes to the external hard drive. I still keep getting the message that my start up disc is full. Please help.

What else can I do. All of itunes should be on the external hard drive. I think 3TB is plenty of space. Could it be my iphoto? I moved all those to the external hard drive too.

lllaass wrote:
Yes, you should format the HD.
A Mac can natively write to a NTSF drive and that is what most drives com formatted with.
You should use the Mac journaled format.
Once again you are posting incorrect information
Until we know what format the drive is it is impossible to state that it must be formatted - that is just a guess
And a Mac can not Natively write to an NTSF drive - it can natively read it but can not write to it with special software
And since formatting a drive erases it it is critical to tell users not to format until they have a positively known good backup
The TOU for these forum state that you should test your answers prior to posting them -- you obviously are not doing that and you advice is endangering users photos - please only post tested answers
LN

Start up disc is full how do I free up space?

I have deleted films, music and photo's but still not enough free space.

Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive
1. See Lion/Mountain Lion's Storage Display.
2. You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.
3. Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.
4. Also see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.
5. See Where did my Disk Space go?.
6. See The Storage Display.
You must Empty the Trash in order to recover the space they occupied on the hard drive.
You should consider replacing the drive with a larger one. Check out OWC for drives, tutorials, and toolkits.
Try using OmniDiskSweeper 1.8 or GrandPerspective to search your drive for large files and where they are located.

When I try to add Chinese as a language to use on my macbook, I get an error message saying that system preferences quit unexpectedly. How can i prevent this from happening?

It requires me to re-open Language&text but i just get the same error. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I need Chinese for class.
Thanks

Is there some reason you cannot update to the standard 10.6 install? The combo updater to use is at
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1399
Otherwise you might try setting up a new user account and see if you still have the problem when logged into that.
Most likely you have a bad .plist in Home/Library/Preferences

My macbook pro is saying start up disc is full. My storage says I have 500gb in "other."

My macbook pro says my start up disc is full. I have read other threads trying to solve the problem but can't seem to figure it out. My mail hasn't received msgs in several months so I assume it has something to do with that. My "other" storage had 500gb! How do I figure out where the problem is and what I need to delete??

Do you have Time Machine enabled?
Allan

I'm being told my start up disc is full on my 2010 macbook. Memory is 2GB 1067 MHz; and Finder tells me I have 1.05 GB still available. Do I need a bigger hard drive?

I'm getting error message that my start up disc is full on my 2010 macbook. Started with 2GB 1067 MHz; and, according to Finder, still have 1.05 GB available. Any idea what's up? I had MacKeeper dump all junk files. Do I need a new hard drive?

First of all I would suggest you get rid of MacKeeper, which is well known in the Mac community to be useless or in some cases to be as bad as malware. Read this user tip by Klaus1.
The startup disk (your hard drive) is not the same as the system memory (the 2GB of RAM you describe.) You may very well need a larger hard drive, but the first thing I would try would be looking through your downloads folder for old installer disk images, deleting any that you do not need any more (usually all of them) and emptying your trash. Many users put files in their trash and forget to empty it.
If that doesn't gain you sufficient space, you may want to replace your hard drive with a larger model. You don't mention what size drive you have, but it is possible to do it yourself. See page 37 of this user manual.
Another option would be to put files that are taking up a large amount of space (often iTunes and iPhoto Libraries fall into this category) on an external hard drive. This works best if you do not need portability.
Best of luck.

Message saying my "start up disc is full" how can I empty it? Where is it?

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