Startup disk FULL..release what ? & HOW?

i am occasionally getting an error message that my startup disk is getting full...i guess i need to release some items. i have been advised music on my itunes library that i very rarely access should leave. i have it backed up to dvd's. Now, all i do is send them to the trash? Then when i need the songs...just insert the dvd & Viola???
i also tried to backup a movie from imovie & idvd...actually it did but i got an error message it wouldn't...so i am a wee bit confused....
am i on the right track??
thanks in advance:)

Similar Messages

Startup Disk Full. What exactly does this mean and what can I do about it?

I was downloading some TV shows from the itunes store when my computer informed me that my startup disk was almost full and iTunes informed me that there was an error with the downloading because my disk was full. I assume this means that the hard drive memory is full, but I don't know if there is anything more specific I should know. We've had this computer for several years and recently updated to Snow Leopard and iLife 09. I have a lot of music and pictures, and I would rather not have to delete a lot of them to free up more memory space. Are there other things I can do to clear memory space or add more?

Hi
+"Are there other things I can do to clear memory space or add more?"+
Yes. Either replace the internal drive with a much larger one or purchase an externally attached drive (USB or Firewire or both) and transfer all your pictures and movies onto that instead. Either way will involve an outlay of some sort? Another way would be to start backing up less important photos, music and movies onto CD or better still DVD. You do have a built-in DVD Burner of some description. You could use it as that is primarily one of the reasons it's there for. Once you've backed up desired data start deleting it from the internal drive.
It's important to leave some free space on the drive that contains the Operating System. Not doing so will invariably cause potentially major problems in terms of performance and the proper running of your computer. Think of it this way. If you were to constantly stuff yourself full of food would you be able to function properly or as well as you normally do? Not a great analogy but should give you enough of an idea?
Tony

What do i need to do when i get a startup disk full error?

What do i need to do when i get a startup disk full error? I can't update software or use my MacAir at all.

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.
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.
To locate large files, you can use Spotlight. That method may not find large folders that contain a lot of small files.
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.
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 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 not to screw up. 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. It may take some minutes for ODS to list all the 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.

What do you do when message is "startup Disk Full"?

what do you do when message is "startup Disk Full"?

You must Move or trash some really big GB+ sized files right away, before OSX destroys itself.
Empty the Trash if you haven't lately.
How much free space is on the HD, where has all the space gone?
OmniDiskSweeper is likely the easiest/best, and is now free...
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/download/
And if needed, you can use Terminal to run it in admin mode to see files/folders your user can't see...
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/how_to_recover_missing_hard_drive_space/

My startup disk is full?!?! This has been happening for a while and I have dumped 4500 jepegs from iPhoto onto an external drive to try and free up space. I am still recieving the "Startup disk full" message. What more can I do?!?!

My startup disk is full?!?! This has been happening for a while and I have dumped 4500 jepegs from iPhoto onto an external drive to try and free up space. I am still recieving the "Startup disk full" message. What more can I do?!?!

Did you empty the Trash?
What size hard drive & how much free space. You should always have a minimum of 10-15% or more free space?
 Cheers, Tom

WHAT I DO WHEN THE SCREEN IS BLUE BECAUSE Startup Disk FULL?

WHAT I DO WHEN THE SCREEN IS BLUE BECAUSE Startup Disk FULL?

Have a look to this post : Blue Screen on Startup with MacBook Air Rev A (fitted with Hard Drive)

Startup Drive full. What should I move to an external drive and how?

Startup Drive full. What should I move to an external drive and how? By "how" I mean what would the steps be to move photos and music so I could take them off the Startup Drive.

iPhoto: How to move the Library folder to a new location
iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Media folder
See also:
iPhoto: Issues with FAT32-formatted drives

HT1349 when I start my macbook it shows STARTUP DISK FULL, and I cannot do anything else, it doesnt let me get into the computer to delete any programs,,,, What should I do ?

when I start my macbook it shows STARTUP DISK FULL, and I cannot do anything else, it doesnt let me get into the computer to delete any programs,,,, What should I do ?

Try starting in Safe mode which does not load all the software that is used in a regular boot. It also runs a disk check. After booting in safe mode transfer or trash stuff you don't really need so as to free up disk space. Be sure to hold the shift key down continously till a progress bar shows on the screen.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1564
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1455

Adobe Photoshop Scratch Disk Full/Startup Disk Full error - PLEASE HELP

Dear ALL,
I have started to notice recently that when I run Photoshop CS on my Mac OSX Tiger, I am getting the Startup Disk Full error message. Never happended before.
Since my initial post I downloaded Macaroni (utility) and have run the daily/weekly/monthly backups, checked the /private/var/vm and /private/var/log and /Volumes. Nothing unusual there...
When I started getting this error I had 32GB left on a looked at my HD and I seem to have 32GB available on a 152GB drive. Now after deleting I have 76GB capacity left.
But when I tried to open a Photoshop PSD or TIFF file and do a crop I still get tge Startup Disk is Full error followed by the Adobe Photoshop error Scratch Disk is Full.
I am thinking of running the Disk Utility from the Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility and doing a Verify Disk and Verify Disk Permissions followed by Repair Disk Permissions. I will be logged into the machine whilst doing this. Is there any danger in this as I have read elsewhere that I need to do this from a bootable volume. If that is the case how do I create a bootable disk/cd? If not then what is the cure to my Disk Full as surely there is now nearly 50% FREE!!!!!
Please help.
Max

PS will always use the boot disk for scratch to some extent even with an alternate primary scratch disk.
Be sure to turn off Spotlight as it causes problems.
4GB of RAM would be nice, I understand small files don't work well if there is more than 4GB RAM but large files will. OS X uses free RAM as cache and RAM disk before using disk drives.
How much RAM is allocated to PS? More RAM would help.
A dedicated lean boot drive helps. Install just what is needed for your work, use a separate drive for data, and yet another RAID volume for scratch.
When in doubt, backup with SuperDuper, and do an erase and then restore. Always backup before repairing; and never, ever, use an old version of Tiger CD/DVD - like 10.4.2 on 10.4.7/.8. Use "fsck" instead, or your emergency boot drive.
Also, give Applejack a shot and delete the cache folders and swap files from time to time to keep a system humming. CS/CS2 and Tiger benefit nicely from more RAM.

I keep getting "startup disk full" message even when I already moved all my files/documents to an external hard disk

Dear all,
What should I do? I keep getting the "startup disk full" message even when I already moved all my files and documents to an external hard disk.
Thanks a heap.

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
Do the same in other applications, such as Aperture, that have an internal Trash feature. Then reboot. That will temporarily free up some space.
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.

This is baffling me...Startup Disk Full issue

Dear Members,
Yesterday I posted on this forum for some help with resolving a Startup Disk Full message that was appearing when I was using Adobe PhotoShop CS. This only started to happen recently ( 2 days ago). When I try and crop a TIFF or RAW file I get the Scratch Disk Full and the Startup Disk Full errors.
So I followed your advise and made backups, rebooted from an external CD (Tiger osx) and did the repair thing. There was minor header damage at the time. But this was fixed. I did a small test with Photoshop and all appeared OK, that is until this morning. I tried to edit/crop a TIFF file and I got the same messages again.
I have approx 152GB of total disk space now and after deleted/re moving to external media, I have approx 82GB of available space. I also have 2 GB of RAM. Yes I removed the files prior to doing the Disk Utility repair. And yes I did run Repair Permissions too. I have been using this setup for over a year with no issues, and YES the TIFF and RAW files have always been huge (approx 35MB).
What is baffling me now is why do I still get this error message. I took the liberty to re-run Disk Utility from external bootable CD and the Verify showed everything to be fine. So my questions are:
1. why am I still getting this error?
2. Am I at risk of damaging my system in any way?
3. How can I fix this issue?
Any help/pointers appreciated.
Max

OK Guys I think I have solved my problem.
In my desperation to find meaning to why this was happening I stumbled across another forum where a user had a slightly related issue -> http://kubotaworkshops.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1028&sid=5e2982e3da6027f683997 ffbcf088d59
In there he had mentioned a root cause of a related issue. Immediately I checked to see what the settings for the Crop tool were set to, and to my surprise they were at 300inches x 400 inches at 300 dpi. According to his calculations this put the Scratch Disk size at pretty large.
Anyway I am not quite sure on his mathematics and how he arrived at the 60.3GB file size, but I am guessing that my files were large to start with and somehow the scratch disk size needed was even larger, hence the reason for the error. Would appreciate if someone can explain how the 60.3GB was derived from a 100K file, 400x600inc @ 300dpi as in the link above
Hopefully this was the fix. I have tried it out and I am able to crop. But then again thats what I said yesterday
Max

Help: Premiere is making my startup disk full, but I set everything to go on an external hard drive.

The iMac I am using is for the sole purpose of editing and nothing else. I have no idea what is making my startup disk full, and I can not locate the files that are filling the startup disk except the fact that it is telling me I am running out of space. The startup disk is a 250GB SSD, the second internal drive is 1 TB HDD. All of my premiere and video files are loaded ton a 4TB G-RAID.

Do you have your projects set to use a drive other than startup?
My 3 hard drives to edit AVCHD are configured as...
1 - 320Gig Boot for Win7 64bit Pro and ALL program installs
2 - 320Gig data for Win7 paging swap file and video project files
When I create a project on #2 drive, the various work files follow,
so my boot drive is not used for the media cache folders and files
3 - 1Terabyte data for all video files... input & output files

Startup disk full error - boots normally but won't start finder

I'm having a problem in which my iMac when it boots gives me an error that the startup disk is full, but other than that it can boot normally and allow me to log in, but after that the startup stalls. I never get past the default "outer space" desktop image and finder never starts, so there's no icons, no dock, and nothing on the menu bar. What's weird is that Safari and Mail start and I can see them because I believe I have them starting automatically at boot. Safari works (I'm using it now to enter this discussion). Mail on the other hand starts but is hung checking for the servers for incoming mail.
I've tried to boot in safe mode (holding down Shift key at startup), but it doesn't work.
I've tried to boot in single user mode (holding down cmd-S at startup), but it doesn't work either.
I've tried to boot from Snow Leopard installation media (holding down C at startup), but it doesn't work as well.
Each time I try one of these alternate boot methods, it just takes me to the normal login screen with the startup disk full message. I click OK, login, and get stuck.
I'm just trying to get the finder started so that I can delete some files, but I just can't get that far. It's strange that the browser works perfectly and internet connection is fine, but nothing else works.
Thoughts? Thanks. - Mike

Hi Lina, and welcome to Apple Discussions.
Safe Mode might allow you to boot and free up some space.
If you have access to another Mac and a FireWire cable, another option would be to use FireWire Target Disk Mode to transfer data to the other Mac and delete it on your MBA.
If either way works, you want to open up somewhere around 15% free space. Once you do that, run Repair Disk: Boot from install disc (insert disc>restart>immediately hold down c key and keep holding it until you see “Preparing Installation”)>at first screen select the language and click Continue> click on the Utilities Menu in the menu bar>open Disk Utility>select your HD in the panel on the left side>click Repair Disk at bottom of main window. Run this at least twice, and keep running it until it says “appears ok” twice in a row. If that doesn’t happen, you may need a stronger utility such as DiskWarrior or if the directory is damaged beyond repair, you may need to reinstall the OS, or you may have a damaged HD (repair utilities can only repair the directory structure, not the HD itself).
Ultimately, though, it sounds like you need a larger HD . . . .

Startup Disk Full Error - Please help

Dear ALL,
I have started to notice recently that when I run Photoshop CS on my Mac OSX Tiger, I am getting the Startup Disk Full error message.
I have no clue as to how to correctly fix this issue. I looked at my HD and I seem to have 32GB available, which I would have thought would have been ample space. I have started to remove unwanted files and backup to CD large image files. So this should free up some more space. The question is will this be enough to get rid of this issue and is it associated with the amount of HD space on my drive? or would I need to run some script etc? or download/buy some other product to fix this?
Your help is greatly appreciated.
Max

OK I tried Macaroni...and when I tried to work with a TIFF file I get the same Startup Disk is FULL message. The I get an adobe message saying Scratch Disk is FULL.
Any further suggestions would be appreciated.

When I go to download my iMovie to iTunes I get the following message "Unable to prepare project for publishing. That project could not be prepared for publishing because a error occurred"(disk full). What do I need to do?

When I go to share my Imovie to Itunes after a couple of hours I get the following message. "Unable to prepare project for publishing. That project could not be prepared for publishing because a error occurred(disk full)". What does this mean and how do I fix it?

This is the forum for iOS (iPhones and iPads),
I have refered it to get moved to the correct forum.
But my guess is that you have to clear space on your harddrive.
The video gets rendered when you out put it, so you will need lots of space to do so.

Imac frozen at blue screen after i went into disk utilities and cleaned my free space. I tried holding down T key as it reboots and i get a message. Start up disk full empty it how can one emptie it if you cant get past the blue screen

Imac frozen at blue screen after i went into disk utilities and cleaned free space.
I tried holding down T key as it reboots
and i get a message. Start up disk full empty it how can one emptie it if you cant get past the blue screen?
to make matters worse we bought the IMAC of amazon uk on the 4/07/011 so what can we do?
please remember how frustrating it is when asking for help when the helper telling you to type something on the screen when its frozen
Tell us when you can type some instuctions to the software how do you get to the doss prompt so to speak to do this
Thanks

i tried all this thanks
i can not get past blue screen and message Your disk is full it needs to be emptied Please not I cant proceed past this message.
no matter what you tell me
Am i right ok in thinking that
when i went into disk utilities and chose to clean my free space i left it over one hour to do its stuff
i came back and there was no progress bar just the box so i quit the program and when i opened mac mail the system just froze i forced quit mail rebooted and blue screen death
Now when free space is being cleaned is it the same as windows dose the utility write lots of 0 on the hard drive then rebbot its self to free the space
basicly is my hard drive full of 00000 is this why im getting this message because the process was interupted
I need to know if i need outside help i bought the computer on line on amazon uk what dose one do next

Startup disk FULL..release what ? & HOW?

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