Start up disc memory

why am I getting pop up box saying start up disc has no available app memory and asking me to quit safari and other applications or force quit.

Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive
See Lion's Storage Display.
You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.
Also see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.
See Where did my Disk Space go?.
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.

Similar Messages

Start up disc memory issue

sometimes my imac says that there is no memory/space on the start up disc. Why is this?

jenniferfromtrumbull wrote:
capacity is 499.76 GB
available is 382.69 GB
used is 117.08GB on disc
OK, plenty of HD space. BTW when replying please click Reply in message you're replying to, otherwise we can't tell who your communication is directed to.
I would recommend opening Activity Monitor (Applications - Utilities - Activity Monitor) when the machine is running OK, when you get the message you are complaining about then check Activity Monitor - System Memory and see how much FREE RAM it has. Most systems need about 500 MB free or more to run well. If you have less then you may have to upgrade the RAM. It will look something like:

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.

New memory card installed but getting 'Start up disc full' message?

Running on an old Power Mac G4, 256 MB, I have recently got a new ipod and began filling my itunes when I get a 'start up disc full' message. I've successfully installed another identical 256 MB memory card which the computer is recognizing (now showing 512 MBs of memory) but after downloading another 1 or 2 CDs I'm back to 'start up disc full'. I know I have the correct memory card for my G4 but it isn't allowing me more memory. Any suggestions? Do I have to change something that isn't in my owners manual?

Hi-
Welcome to Discussions!
You need more hard drive space. Although replacing the internal with another, larger drive is an option, it is easy to just add another drive. The G4, any model, can use up to 4 internal drives.
Some have size limits, so you need to tell us your G4 model. Use the "About this Mac" in the Apple menu on your desktop, and the following to ID your model:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58418
Another option is to buy an external firewire hard drive, so you can backup, and store files on it, freeing up space on your strtup drive. You really should have an external, anyways, so you have a backup, and don't lose any data if there is a problem.
Adding a hard drive is relatively easy. You can find Do It Yourself guides in the following:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=31292

OSX start up disc has no more space available for applicaion memory

Apop up comes on the screen that says "OSX" ... the start up disc has no more space avaiable for appication memory.

This is intended as constructive feedback (for whatever that is worth).
I have read all the threads since 2010 regarding the error message: "Your Mac OS X startup disc has no more space available for application memory." The solutions suggested here are well intended and surely will help the folks with inadequate memory or memory usage problems.
However, like some others who have posted here, none of the solutions posted here (since 2010) relate to my getting this error message. When I get this message, my Mac mini has no memory shortage, does not have too many applications running nor does it need the trash emptied.
I am not a guru by any means, but I've been a Mac user since 1992. I can tell you that when I get this error message it is some kind of glitch -- an erroneous error message.
I'm sure of this because when I restart my Mac, the problem goes away for several weeks -- then it comes back. I have checked my activity monitor and there are no issues with memory usage.
I suspect that some Macs develop a problem over time that causes this error message to pop up -- but it is not actually related to memory usage. It is an erroneous message, but I have no idea what causes it.
Just my 2 cents worth.

IMac 5 running Mountain Lion I get message "your Mac OSX start up disc has no more space available for application memory" I have moved approx. 6 apps from the dock but still get same message,what e

Receiving message "your Mac OSX start up disc has no more space available for application memory."
This has just started in past week, I removed about 6 apps from dock to see if it cleared it but message still appears. Mac is iMac 5 with Mountain Lion (10.8.4)
Would appreciate some help.
Barb

The message has nothing to do with available disk space. There is excessive swapping of data between physical memory and virtual memory.
That can happen for two reasons:
You have a long-running process with a memory leak (i.e., a bug), or
You don't have enough memory installed for your usage pattern.
Tracking down a memory leak can be difficult, and it may come down to a process of elimination.
In the Activity Monitor application, select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected. Click the heading of the Real Mem column in the process table twice to sort the table with the highest value at the top. If you don't see that column, select
View ▹ Columns ▹ Real Memory
from the menu bar.
If one process (excluding "kernel_task") is using much more memory than all the others, that could be an indication of a leak. A better indication would be a process that continually grabs more and more real memory over time without ever releasing it. Here is an example of how it's done.
The process named "Safari Web Content" renders web pages for Safari and other applications. It uses a lot of memory and may leak if certain Safari extensions or third-party web plugins are installed. Consider it a prime suspect.
If you don't have an obvious memory leak, your options are to install more memory (if possible) or to run fewer programs simultaneously.
The next suggestion is only for users familiar with the shell. For a more precise, but potentially misleading, test, run the following command:
sudo leaks -nocontext -nostacks process | grep total
where process is the name of a process you suspect of leaking memory. Almost every process will leak some memory; the question is how much, and especially how much the leak increases with time. I can’t be more specific. See the leaks(1) man page and the Apple developer documentation for details.

New to Mac - do I need to create a start-up disc?

Hi
I've recently switched over to an iMac from PC - I've worked with macs but I didn't have to deal with back-ups myself (they were all networked)
I have an external HDD which uses Time Machine to back-up - I did hope to use that as back-up and keep a stash of stock photos (large file!) on there too but I've heard that it's not a good idea to do that (even if I partitioned the drive)
My main issue is that I've heard that the back-ups cannot be used as a 'start-up' disc in case something happens to the iMac - so can someone let me know how I should go about doing this? (I didn't get any discs with the iMac so what do I do if something does happen?)
and while I'm asking questions... do you think I should get another external HDD? one to use for photo storage etc (I work professionally with Photography so they are large files) and then use the other for time-machine?
can you use a smaller sized HDD for time-machine? (the external drive I have now is 500GB -
Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac8,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz
Memory: 4 GB
Hard Drive 320GB

I've moved over from a PC to a MBP since May, and have dealt with similar backup issues concerning backups of software projects (also large files) daily. So I can share my thoughts and experience here.
1) I would keep the photo file originals on a separate external USB HDD (not the Time Machine backup) with Read-Only attribute. When I copy files from my Mac to an external disk drive, I think it automatically takes on an archive attribute (read-only). With Leapord 10.5, I think that drive can even be in NTFS format (as used by Windows XP & Vista).
Since HDD eventually fails, I would, over time, back up these high resolution photos on Dual density (8GB) DVDs.
Because it'll probably take too many DVDs to back up al the photos, an easier option is to purchase an external backup drive systems that automatically back up a copy of your data on its own separate physical HDD package inside the same box. At the minimum, the box would actually contain two identical size HDD, but you get to use only one. The second drive is for the automatic backup. These boxes are called RAIDs, and a decent one will notify you when it detects a disk error on any one of the two drives so you can preventively replace the faulty drive to give your data full protection. The best I've seen cost $800 list for a TeraByte of protected disk storage. This box actually uses multiple data redundancy schemes to give you flexibility in buying HDDs as your need grows, but you do need to start with at least two drives for data protection. See...
http://www.drobo.com/WheretoBuy/Index.html
A review of its abilities and limitations was published on ZDNet..
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=508
The author of the review called himself his first review harsh, and I agree since the limitations was due to physics and user selection of disk drives that were installed, no design.
2) For any photo files that I am manipulating daily, I would keep them on my Mac so that Time Machine so that every revision I make is backed up.
As far as whether you need to create a start-up disk, I believe the answer is no. From Apples own online documentation, you can recovering your Mac installation from Time Machine. I understand that if you allow Time Machines to back up up everything (default setting), the procedure to full system recovery is:
1) Reformat the boot disk and restore MacOS X from the CDs that came with the computer.
2) Connect the external Time Machine backup drive, bring up Time Machine and restore. You can find the details by searching the Time Machine discussions. I saw some users even tried the procedure out for real.
I've consider using one of the many backup software to back up a full disk image of my Mac, so I re-install my Mac with that disk image. The problem with this is it's a duplicating backup scheme: twice the amount of work and cost. And when the mac crashes, which one backup do I use?

Start up disc full, tried everything I can find, no changes, help?

I posted this somewhere earlier, sorry for repeating, but I can't find it. AFter getting the start up disc full message, I backed up everything on an external hard drive with Time Machine, and additionally, copied everything from iphoto on to the same drive, different partition. I have freed up tons of memory, but no change to the start up disc when I check it in the activity monitor area. I have restarted it a number of times, emptied all trash, and checked the console log for messages. I see lots of "failed to count the number of files in the "/system/library/memory/startupItems": No such directory. Other than that, nothing popped out at me. I also ran the diagnostics for the disc and repaired all permission scripts, (I think that's what it said) no help.
I am grateful for any help, could it be a virus or an error I can't detect?
Thanks,
Veronica

Would that have worked if I had tried it before the "archive and install"? Because that is what I tried next and it didn't work, and I'm just wondering if it didn't work BECAUSE I tried to do the Archive and Install first? Or if it just never would've worked because my hard drive's messed up?
I'm just wondering because after I got the last response, I called Apple Care to see if there was ANYthing else I could do before having to either erase everything or actually haul it down to the Apple store, and it's the Apple care guy who told me to try the Archive and Restore first. So I'm just a bit annoyed if this could've been avoided by simply doing a new install first, if it's the Archive and Install that ruined everything...

My start up disc is almost full. How can I get my data stored on my 2nd disc

I have an i Mac working with OS X 10.9.5 Processor: 2.93 GHz Intel Core i7. I have a solid state hard disc of 250 GB which is the start up disc. There is a conventional second hard disc of 2 TB. The way it is set up the 2nd disc is not being used. My start up disc is almost full. How to I change it so that my data is stored on my 2nd disc.

I am having the same problem Have devoted well over 10 hours to the destroyed WD Passport, memory and constant crashes of untold origin, and of course wasting time with the good ol' spinning wheel of death. Any fixes for memory, back up drives and crashes would be welcome. I am tired of these upgrades making my life worse. Once upon a time Apple cared and was not so awful in customer relations and quality of upgrades to the OS. Now, not so much. I am searching through the now more difficult to search through Discussions to find fixes for these problems but have not opened any that are satisfactory. Please will someone in the know, not so much an Apple shill cause they just blame the user, but actual Apple users and customers who have had these issues and can now share the knowledge. Please!

How do I go about making room on my Start Up Disc?

I'm sure this has been posted before, but I still haven't seen a response that is satisfactory (and simplistic...I'm a "simple" minded person. LoL).
Lately, my Powerbook G4 has provided the warning that my Start Up Disc was full and that I needed to make room by deleting stuff (Applications? Programs? Files?).
I've wondered how this could be, seeing as how even this past year I updated my memory (RAM, I believe) from the basic factory installed memory of two 256 mb sticks by replacing one of the sticks with a new 512 mb stick (giving me approximately 768 mbs).
So, my question is this: How do I go about "cleaning" up my Start Up Disc? What steps do I take? Is there an application in my System Preferences that I can use?
I hate to ask so many questions, but I need "baby steps" here people! LoL. While I might do pretty good in diagnosing problems with software and WiFi trouble shooting...this problem has me at a loss.
Any help is more than appreciated!
- Johnny C.
Powerbook G4 15 inch Mac OS X (10.4.9) First version of Powerbook G4, before the lovely side ports and non-black keyboard...

Jonathan:
I don't believe you got around to posting the size of your Hard Disk Drive and the available space as per ali brown's directions. Maybe I missed it in scanning the posts. In any case, your PB G4 would have come with a 10, 20 or 30 GB HDD. The rule of thumb is that you should have at least 10%-15% of free space for your computer to run efficiently and avoid directory and performance issues.
You have gotten good advice on how to lean down the info on your HDD to create more available space. However, as you have learned, "nature abhors a vacuum" and computer users fill up free HDD space as nature fills up a vacuum.
My recommendation is to consider getting a larger HDD. Here is a list of drives for your computer from OWC. They will offer you more storage capacity, increased speed, better performance and less risk of data loss due to directory issues. If you are handy you can install it yourself with these directions. I have based the above on the information you gave as having the first G4 15" PB.
If this answered your question, great! If not, please post back with further questions or comments.
Good luck.
cornelius
Message was edited by: cornelius

Can't Get Start-Up Discs to Start Up.

I have two problems I can't solve. I bought a new 21" iMac last summer. On the main drive I have 10.9.5 installed. On a second external USB 3 drive (connected directly to the back of the mac - not through a hub) I have 10.9.4 installed. I need to keep this in order to run an older version of Final Cut Pro that I still need. Also, I have an empty partition that I would like to install Yosemite onto so I can check it out before I upgrade the main system to it permanently. My problem is, the Start-Up disc System Pref see's the 10.9.4 drive and let's me choose it, but when the computer restarts, it's still the 10.9.5 system. So I tried to press Option on restart. Then the computer doesn't even see the 10.9.4 drive. It does see the partition with my 10.9.3 Maverick's installer and will let me boot onto it. But when I start the installation process it takes two hours to download the "Additional Content" but then instead of installing, it boots to my 10.9.5 drive. My understanding is that I have to install Mavericks before I can upgrade it to Yosemite, right? Or can I download the installer and use it to install onto a clean external hard drive? What do I do? I can't work in Final Cut Pro and I can't install a new System anywhere. I may be able to borrow a MacBook Pro so I can start the iMac in Target Disc mode, but really that's got to be a last resort. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Yes, if you erase the startup volume you will need to install an operating system.
If you cannot find your original discs, you might consider upgrading to Snow Leopard. You can buy that disc from Apple for $20:
Online (US): http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC573/mac-os-x-106-snow-leopard
Snow Leopard ought to convey nothing but advantages for your Mini, unless it a model produced prior to 2006, which were limited to only 1 GB memory. Snow Leopard requires 2.

Start-up Disc Corrupted all the time

Start-up Disc Corrupted all the time
MacBook Pro early 2008 running 10.6.4 and Windows 7.
My MBP, early 2008, 2.5 GHz, 4GB Memory, HARD Disc 250 GB Hitachi (HTS 542525K9SA00) needs disc repair and erase and reinstall ever 5 days or so. This problem started in 10.6.3 and is continuing in 10.6.4. Which was updated by combo 10.6.4 and backed up with time capsule/time machine.
Even though it will not start up on Mac 10.6.4 it will still boot up on Windows 7. It will also boot up with the Snow leopard disc and repair. However some times even after the repair it will not boot up and I have to reinstall 10.6 + about 5 times
I have completely erased and zeroed out and reinstalled twice but I still get the problem about 4 days later. This was necessary because even though the disc was repaired successfully it would still not boot up.
In reading about Resolving Disk Corruption at http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/repairprocess.html#Anchor-Using-47857
The article suggests that a 'Bad Sectors' can cause this problem and suggest a complete zeroed out rein install, which I have done, They also recommend the purchase of DiskWarrior or TechTool Pro. Both are around US$95 on line. Which one is the best to purchase?? They say that TechTool Pro can identify a 'Bad Sector'
The article also suggested Bad sectors can be an early indication of a hard drive that will eventually need to be replaced.
I have now order a new 320 GB Hitachi HB from USA and it will take about 14 days to arrive. I have also completely erased and reinstalled again, but this time I have not reinstalled window 7.
I have also reset the power and PRAM a number of times but it made no difference to the problem.
I have not shut down the MacBook and I am leaving it in sleep mode as the problem really only seems to come about when the MacBook has been shutdown for a day or two.
I am quite sick of reinstalling. Has anyone else had this problem and is it my HD or software issue???
I have also reset the power and PRAM a number of times but it made no difference to the problem.
Best Regards Peterbill

Gurus - Can you please advice on this. Basically have developed a form and couple of users want to access that but get error " page cannot be displayed" and I figured out the "Start OC4J instance" windows gets closed automatically after some hours.
so I wanted this OC4J instance to run 24*7 ( always) without closing by itself. Please advice how could I do that.
Thanks
Sheik

HELP! START UP DISC FULL...What do I do?

My computer says start up disc is full. I have 59GB of photos in my iphoto library. I have copied them all to external hard drive, but nervous to delete it. What is the best 2nd option to save them to? I can't do updates or much at all right now. I can't even upload photos from my library to snapfish or shutterfly to make photo book. Do I invest in $50 a month for cloud service? Buy a second hard drive? Move them all to discs? I just can't believe 21,000 pics have completely filled my memory.
Thanks!
Juli

You might look through this for ideas on freeing up some space....
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/freeingspace.html

Not enough space on my start-up disc.

Hi, I am currently putting all my CD's onto my mini. I have connected an external HD (250GB) to cope with the growing memory needed. I then shifted itunes onto the new external HD. But, I am now getting messages telling me my start-up disc is full when I try to add albums and when I try to burn CDs. I though the external HD would solve my memory problems, is the start- up disc space a separate issue I need to deal with?
Any suggestions gratefully accepted, cheers.

Hi Herrie
Welcome to Discussions.
Yes, your startup disk and your external disk are two seperate volumes.
To make space on your startup disk, you need to move files off it, onto your external Volume, check to make sure those copied files are successfully copied and working in their new location, then delete those files on the Startup disk.
Think of it as two containers. To make more room in one, you have to shift that over to the other.
You are certainlyy correct to think your 250 GB external drive should fix your storage problems, that is ample space. It is just that once music files are shifted over there, you have to then delete them off the Startup disk.
If this solves your question, please consider awarding stars, by checking the helpful or solved button on the post. This is not a requirement, merely an expression of thanks.
reagrds roam

Start-Up Disc Full Notification

I still have 56 GB of space in my start up disc but my computer is saying that I don't have enough memory to eun other applications. I've done the disk utility repair, used CCleaner, removed unecessary files, and practically went through the whole process. Not sure if my computer has somekind of virus or I'm just missing something. Appreciate any help I can get.

Your problem is not lack of disk space, but excessive swapping of data between physical memory and virtual memory.
That can happen for two reasons:
You have a long-running process with a memory leak (i.e., a bug), or
You don't have enough memory installed for your usage pattern.
Tracking down a memory leak can be difficult, and it may come down to a process of elimination. In Activity Monitor, select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected. Click the heading of the Real Mem column in the process table twice to sort the table with the highest value at the top. If you don't see that column, select
View ▹ Columns ▹ Real Memory
from the menu bar.
If one process (excluding "kernel_task") is using much more memory than all the others, that could be an indication of a leak. A better indication would be a process that continually grabs more and more memory over time without ever releasing it.
If you don't have an obvious memory leak, your options are to install more memory (if possible) or to run fewer programs simultaneously.
The next suggestion is only for users familiar with the shell. For a more precise, but potentially misleading, test, run the following command:
sudo leaks -nocontext -nostacks process | grep total
where process is the name of a process you suspect of leaking memory. Almost every process will leak some memory; the question is how much, and especially how much the leak increases with time. I can’t be more specific. See the leaks(1) man page and the Apple developer documentation for details:
Memory Usage Performance Guidelines: About the Virtual Memory System

Start up disc memory

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for