Hard Drive Issue?

Okay, well today, strangely, I was downloading a few programs, and all of the sudden my macbook said my memory was full...which I knew for a fact I had about 16gb left. Closed everything, still read that the harddrive was full. Rebooted..which took about 3 or so minutes, whereas its normally 20-30 seconds. However, sure enough, I do, now, in fact have 16 gb or memory.

Why would it all of the sudden tell me that I had no available memory and show in the harddrive's "get info" that it was 159.7/159.7gb, followed by the slowest bootup ever?

I have taken it to the genius bar before, said there could be a HD issue, but to restore it and see what happens. This was months ago and I haven't had any problems since.

seems to be working fine now....but Im afraid to do much, as I dont have anything to backup on right now.

Any insight?



Its a MacBook (aluminum) running OS X 10.6.4.

Did it say "memory" or "disk space"? There's a huge difference. Also, did you happen to record the exact verbiage of the message?

Disk space. However now it has crashed overnight. From what I can tell it no longer recognizes the fact that there is a hard drive. I have also tried to boot the install disk to try and use the disk repair as well as trying to boot in safe mode. This has only given me a very obscure blue screen which does nothing. I'll try and get a picture of it on here but all I have right now is an iPhone.

Side note: 16GB disk space of a 160GB drive is not much. You need a new HDD anyways since yours is so close to full. Always try to keep about 15% or 20% of your drive freed up. ...at minimum.

When trying to boot from install cd

Found snow leopard disk. Got it to run, confirmed: hard drive not recognized.