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Startup disk is almost full.

I received a message saying "Startup Disk" is almost full. So, the logical thing was to start deleting things to free it up. I wanted to check to see how much space I have left on my HD and for some reason I cannot locate my HD. I searched in Finder and it wasn't there. I did a search in Spotlight for the Startup Disk and got this message:
The application "Startup Disk" cannot be launched. -10828.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

Power Mac G5, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Sep 3, 2009 11:37 AM

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Posted on Sep 3, 2009 12:11 PM

Hello and welcome back to Apple Discussions!

I might be stating something you are already aware of... but your "startup disk" is just the physical drive/partition your computer starts the OS from. Chances are it is labeled "Macintosh HD" and is located on your Desktop. By default, all drives/partitions that are mounted are displayed on the desktop, with the Startup Disk being on top. To check the available space on this drive, just double-click its icon, and look at the bottom of the finder window that opens. It should say "X.XX GB Available".

As a rule of thumb, I always leave about 5-10% of the disk clean. So if you have a 100 GB drive, you should have about 5-10 GB free for the computer to use for virtual memory/system cache. Once you start encroaching upon this sacred space, you have two options - 1) start erasing things to free up space or 2) add another hard drive for extra storage.

Hopefully that answers your question!
4 replies
Question marked as Best reply

Sep 3, 2009 12:11 PM in response to Scilla25

Hello and welcome back to Apple Discussions!

I might be stating something you are already aware of... but your "startup disk" is just the physical drive/partition your computer starts the OS from. Chances are it is labeled "Macintosh HD" and is located on your Desktop. By default, all drives/partitions that are mounted are displayed on the desktop, with the Startup Disk being on top. To check the available space on this drive, just double-click its icon, and look at the bottom of the finder window that opens. It should say "X.XX GB Available".

As a rule of thumb, I always leave about 5-10% of the disk clean. So if you have a 100 GB drive, you should have about 5-10 GB free for the computer to use for virtual memory/system cache. Once you start encroaching upon this sacred space, you have two options - 1) start erasing things to free up space or 2) add another hard drive for extra storage.

Hopefully that answers your question!

Sep 12, 2009 4:45 PM in response to MyrkridianRhapsody

MyrkridianRhapsody wrote :

« By default, all drives/partitions that are mounted are displayed on the desktop, with the Startup Disk being on top. »
______________

While we are touching the subject of the startup disc showing up on top of the others on the desktop, I am curious to know why that feature seems to have disappeared since I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard. Now, the icons of the discs remain exactly where they were when I initiate a restart, even if I use a different disc to startup. I found it quite useful, on occasions, to instantly see which disc was the one running the show just by glancing at the desktop.

Would someone know why that useful feature would have been removed from Leopard or, better still, how to restore it ?

Thank you.

Startup disk is almost full.

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