Warning Startup Disk has no more room

This morning I got up and woke my computer up and got the warning "Your Mac OSX startup disk has no more space available for applications memory". The only things open were Firefox(1 tab),Mail and Finder. I shut the whole computer down, let it sit for a minute and start back up. I didn't get the warning, but got the spinning wheel of death when I tried to reopen mail and firefox.

Something is dreadfully wrong, but I don't know what is dying. Can anybody give me a course of action and tell me what is happening? Is it hard drive, RAM or what? I have Apple Care and it's less than 2 years old, so I'm not worried about longterm, just want to get this fixed.

Typically when I see this it's one of two things. One, the user has set up time machine to back up the hard drive to itself rather than an external drive. Or two, a log file has gone berserk and is taking up most of the drive. A utility like GrandPerspective can show you all your files, their relative sizes and help you choose large files to delete safely.

A simple way to start with this issue is to simply open up Finder and see how much space you have available by looking at the bottom of the window. How big is your HD and how much space do you have left?

Checked the activity monitor: System Memory-4 GB total-2.73 free; Disk usage 131 G used, 868 G Free....

I went back in, booted up from install disk and repaired Disk and permission. Nothing was found....Perhaps the drive is going bad

Good guess class77. Boot from the install disk again and go into Utilities and run Repair Disk and see what is reported.

harryb2448 said:

Good guess class77. Boot from the install disk again and go into Utilities and run Repair Disk and see what is reported.

Click to expand...

Harry, why do it again?? I just ran it early this afternoon and it showed nothing. What good would it do/what would it show if I ran it again? Seriously asking, not trying to be dismissive of the suggestion

Sounds like a failing HDD to me. If you have an externa drive you could restore your old drive to it and try to boot from that and see if it does the same thing. If it would even retore from it... that takes a lot of reading...