bigger memory & yet startup disk is full

HI, i've got a mac book pro and it's been a year which i bought a bigger memory for it, a 8GB memory. since i've placed the new memory it keeps telling me, my startup disk is full. i have friends that have double the amount of movies,photos,music and big files stored in their laptop and they only have 2GB memory and have no problem with startup disk. i can't download any movies, files or even watch youtube clips when the startup disk is full.

Please let me know how is that possible?? and what do u recommend i should do.

Thanks

The startup disk and system memory are two different things. How big is your hard drive? That needs to be the next upgrade.

You need to look at a new Hard Drive. Or get an external USB hard drive to move the media to and free up your internal hard drive. As JohnCL said above me, Memory (RAM) is not your startup disk (storage)

so is the memory for the speed of the computer?

i've looked at Serial-ATA to get the hard drive size and it's got two different capacity's
one says
volumes: Capacity is 209.7MB
and other one says
Macintosh HD: Capacity is 749.81GB
Available: 517.12GB
so not sure which one or how big my hard drive is?

Memory or RAM is the temporary space used by a computer to store files and applications that are currently being used. So when you open Safari, for instance, it uses space in the memory to load web pages etc. Memory is not persistent. As soon as you close down or put the machine to sleep it is emptied.
The hard disk is your permanent storage. It that that you are filling up with your downloads etc.

The disk you have is a 750gb hard disk. Although the information you've supplied suggests that you have 517gb available - two thirds is empty. So it's strange you should be getting the start up disk errors.

Unless.... your disk has been partitioned (split into two or more 'chunks') .

Can you open the Terminal application (it's in the Applications - Utilities folder).
Type
diskutil list
and press enter.

Copy and paste the results back here.

mrplow said:

Can you open the Terminal application (it's in the Applications - Utilities folder).
Type
diskutil list
and press enter.

Copy and paste the results back here.

Click to expand...

Or, for a graphical method, open up Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/) > select your hard drive > Partition tab and upload a screenshot of that here (to take a screenshot, push Command+Shift+4 and then press spacebar to let you take a screenshot of a specific window).

(I can't believe I offered a graphical solution over a command line one! The Unix nerd in me crying ).

vansmith said:

(I can't believe I offered a graphical solution over a command line one! The Unix nerd in me crying ).

Click to expand...

All will be forgiven given the circumstances.

Ah, you may have forgiven me but who's to say that I've forgiven myself?

hey u guy's i'll forgive you both if you help me out first

ok this is it...


/dev/disk0
#: Type Name Size Identtifier
0: Guid_partition_scheme *750.2 GB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HSF Macintosh HD 749.8 GB disk0s2

OK. You can ignore the EFI partition - that's the boot and recovery partition and you have no acess to that.

You have a single Mac HD disk 750gb in size that has 517gb free. That should not be giving you startup disk full errors.

Open Disk Utility (as per instructions above) and run Disk Repair and Repair Permissions.

When exactly do you get the error message?

so i did as u instructed me & this was the result

for Reapir Disk

Repairing permissions for “Macintosh HD”

Permissions repair complete

AND THE SAME MSG & CODES FOR VERIFYING PERMISSION

Verify permissions for “Macintosh HD”

i don't know why all the codes i pasted for repair desk didn't show up in my last msg

They did but have been edited out, there's no need to post them here.

The question is .... Has it resolved anything?

well i removed so many files of my laptop to a usb drive, so i haven"t got any start up disk messages yet. but what should i do if i get it again?

That's hard to say as you didn't post back about whether the permissions and disk repair had any effect on the issue.

Basically if you have at least 10% disk space free you shouldn't be getting startup disk issues. If genuine, the message is simply telling you you're running out of disk space.