"Start-up Disk is Full" ... yeah, so now what?

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MacBook 10.6.8 OS X; Intel; have Bootcamp split drive for Windows on one side and Appleworld on the other; rarely use the Windows side, and now my Appleside is bringing up a dialog every now and then telling me that my start-up disk is full .... unfortunately, that information alone is rather useless to me as nothing is indicated about how to alleviate that; OS X info tells me: capacity 49.39 GB; available 336.2 MB; Bootcamp info tells me: capacity 30.29 GB; available 20.6 GB. So -- can I resolve the "start-up drive" business by moving about 15 GB from the Bootcamp side back over to OS X? Have no need for all that capacity over there and apparently could benefit from having it on the OS X side. If the answer is, yes, you can do that ... then, how? Thanks!
 

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.... unfortunately, that information alone is rather useless to me as nothing is indicated about how to alleviate that...


The solution is…some of that "stuff" needs to be moved off your hard drive. Stuff cannot just continuously be added and added and added to a hard drive…and not at some point expect it to fill up. Hard drives have a finite amount of storage space…and eventually they will fill up.

If you allow your hard drive to get completely full…your computer will "lock up"…making it unusable, since the Mac OS needs some free hard drive space to operate.

What you need to do is:

- Delete any unnecessary items (old files, photos, music, games, applications, videos, etc.). All of us have at least some of this.
- "Burn" some of the files you don't use regularly onto a CD/DVD…then delete them from your HD.
- Purchase an external hard drive…and store many of the unnecessary (not needed daily items) there.
- Try an online/internet based storage solution like Carbonite.
- Finally you could purchase and install a larger hard drive into your MacBook.

From the info you provided…it appears to only be an 80gig drive…which is not very large by todays standards.

HTH,:)

- Nick
 

bobtomay

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Only way you could move space from the BootCamp partition would be to open BootCamp inside OS X and use it's option to restore that space to OS X.

You would, of course, lose all data in your Windows partition.

Then create a new BootCamp partition with less space and reinstall Windows.

With less than 1GB free space, would be totally surprised if your Mac hasn't already been giving you problems with the spinning beach ball at a minimum and if you haven't had them already, be prepared for system lockups.

Really, with a drive that small, it's time to replace it.
 

pigoo3

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Some folks wouldn't believe it…but I have a 2008 MacBook that I purchased fairly recently that had a bad hard drive. I have various laptop hard drives laying around (all fairly small capacity)…and I ended up installing a 30gig drive.

Thus it's a 2008 MacBook, 30gig hard drive (14gig free), running OS 10.7.5. I basically only use this computer for internet surfing, e-mail, and some online gaming. When storage needs are managed properly…it's amazing how little hard drive storage space is needed.:)

- Nick

p.s. My 2011 MacBook Pro has a 750gig drive. Sheesh…lots and lots of room there!:)
 

bobtomay

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Amazingly for me, am doing ok with my 250GB SSD in my MBA with 180GB free. Having about 8TB of storage around the house helps a lot.
 

pigoo3

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Amazingly for me, am doing ok with my 250GB SSD in my MBA with 180GB free. Having about 8TB of storage around the house helps a lot.

Yeah..with that expensive (and I assume, non-upgradeable) SSD you got to be "frugal" with the storage. I have a lot of backup drives around the house as well…which like you said…helps out a lot!:)

- Nick
 
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Thanks for the info replies; decided that since I had ended up rarely using the Windows side just to erase it, so that puts me with 31GB available in OS X ... will see if that makes for a happier life. Thanks again!
 
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Much better than 336MB! That was miniscule compared to the total capacity you listed.
 

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Do note that having operated with that little free space available on your system partition, the OS X partition is likely heavily fragmented. If you're experiencing slowness, you may want to consider iDefrag or backing up, formatting the disk and then restoring from the backup.
 

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