Start Up Disk Problems

[Kitrh]

Looking for some advice please.

I have a 20" iMac with a 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, Memory of 1GB 667MHz, DDR2 SDRAM, and my Start p Disk is Macintosh HD and am running Tiger 10.4.11

I keep getting error messages saying my Start Up Disk is nearly full - they other day I had to delete loads of stuff before I could make an iDVD, and it even prevented me from using Back Up the last day or 2.

I have nothing in my trash can (I empty it regularly) and I don't have loads of documents. My main use is music (I have 14,000 songs on iTunes), plus 20 or so Garage Band projects.

Can anyone tell me how I can overcome this - do I need to buy more memory for my Mac? And is there anything cheaper than the £90 the Apple Store want for an upgrade.

Please excuse my ignorance, but this is really stressing me out at the moment so grateful for any tips and/or advice.

Chris

Afternote

Probably answered this myself - have only 1.15Gb free on hard disk - need to sort out contents, though I am struggling to work out why its so full!

 

[Chilbear]

Perhaps looking and downloading either Onyx or Tiger Cache Cleaner make help in the short run. These utilities help to clean out logs that are recording events. Perhaps cleaning your system then monitor it very closely to see what, if any, the logs reveal.

Perhaps if you have had lots of freezes/kernal panics you may have lots of temporary files still hanging around.

Best advice I can give is to get a Firewire external and backup your drive NOW and then look for the trouble. A full drive is a ticking time bomb.

 

[harryb2448]

As chilbear suggests get say a 750GB SATA firewire 800 external HDD and case, copy your system including itunes etc onto that using Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper and it will be bootable if you run into problems.

Does not say how big your drive is in your post but over 80% full is asking for troubles.