start up disc memory is full

The startup disk, if you have more than one hard drive, is the one that always shows up in the upper right corner of the screen. The message suggests that there is too much stuff on the hard drive for proper function. When the free space required for normal function becomes too small, all sorts of bad thing start happening.

Single-click you hard drive icon on the Desktop and then use the key combo command i. That brings up this "Get Info" window that will show how much of your hard drive is used:

The amount "Available"should be about 20GB, or more than 10-15 percent of "Capacity" if you have a small hard drive.

Post what you see to confirm the problem and we can go from there to help you free up some space.

I have a Mac Book pro (under 12 months old) which also runs parrells.

Hard drive 750 SATA disk 4 GB Ram

591 GB frree

System memory from activity Monitor:

Free 1.32 GB

Wired 918.8 MB

Active 1.19 GB

Inactive 604 MB

Used 2.67 GB

VM size 176 GB

Page Ins 371 MB

Page outs 0 bytes

Running (in paricular) itunes I constantly get error messages saying my start up disk is full. It looks to me as if I have the resorces but I must be missing something.

How do I increase Start up disk memory?

I am seeing the same problem, but only when I run Safari (I am using firefox now). If I have termial up, I get this dialog:

"Terminal has detected that the system disk is running low on swap space. Scrollback buffers may automatically be trimmed to conserve memory."

Normally I have 136 GB available on a iMac (Intle Core 2 duo with 4 GB SDRAM) running OSX 10.7.5. If I keep the command-Info page open on my hard drive and start Safari, I see that drop to 10 GB and lower in a few seconds. The system becomes slow and almost unusable until I quit safari.

It may be conicidence, but this started after I added an HP5520 to my network and did some printing from safari. I saw some other threads comment on leaking HP drivers. I have not see this problem printing from Firefox or text edit.

Version:10.8.4

FORMAT: MAC OS Extended (journaled)

Capacity: 215.31 GB

Available: 1.72 GB

Used: 2133,586,493,440 bytes (213.59 GB on disk)

The disc utility says that I have 176.2 GB in the "OTHER" category????

I don't even know what Other is???

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Sheila