No Hard Drive Space...0 kb available

Dan,

Your system is definitely suffering from the lack of free space.

Try starting up in Safe Mode, and then attempt to delete extraneous files/data. Safe Boot is a special way to start Mac OS X 10.2 or later when troubleshooting. Safe Mode is the state Mac OS X is in after a Safe Boot.

Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk, by Dr. Smoke will help you identify what files you can safely remove.

You probably have a Previous Systems folder that you can eliminate.

;~)

The best solution here I think is to find someone with another Mac, and use Target Disk Mode to attach your Mac to theirs:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583

It will be exceedingly slow, and will eventually work. Add your Mac which is in Target Disk Mode to Apple menu -> System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy to speed it along. Then locate the various log folders on your machine's drive which you can trash the log files. They are in the Hard drive -> Library -> Logs, Users -> Yourname -> Library -> Logs and System -> Library -> Logs.

Backup your data to a larger hard drive as my FAQ explains:

http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html

Then once your internal, hard drive has at least 2 GB free, dismount it (drag its icon to the trash), and see if you can restart it. If it won't restart, repair its directory as my FAQ explains:

http://www.macmaps.com/directoryfaq.html

arielfr,
I believe all the questions are answered here. Please read it over more carefully. If you can't find the answer, please click on Post a New topic at the beginning of the board:

http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=752&start=0

And someone will be more than happy to help you out. I know these long threads can be hard to read through. I don't think you have any malware, since none has proven to work yet for the Mac.

Dan,

Files dragged to the Trash "will be deleted immediately" alert:

If you are informed that files dragged to the Trash "will be deleted immediately," there are three possible causes:
1. You are either no longer the Owner of your Home folder, do not have Access of Read & Write to such, or both.
2. Your account's Trash, i.e. your ~/.Trash directory, has been deleted.
3. You no longer are the owner of your account's Trash.

OS X needs 10-15% Free Space for virtual memory to operate effectively without the threat of losing files/data.

;~)

No, in fact, unless the file in private is relating to Virex, I wouldn't touch it until you figured out what the file belonged to and if it needs to be there.

It is better to backup, and try trashing files later you don't know what they belong to, than not backup at all.

I had the most unsettling experience last night. I was running several trusted programs when I got a warning that my free disk space was low. I freed up about 1.5Gb and went on about my business (I was not working with large files). I got the warning again and freed up more space. A while later, same thing. This time, I realized something was wrong. Finder said I had about 50MB free... and every few seconds, the free space was diminishing as I was watching!

I shut down all my apps, thinking that maybe one of them was creating a huge scratch file that would disappear when I closed the app, but that wasn't the case. Something was eating my drive and it wasn't any of my apps. I figured that restarting the machine would at least stop the process, so that's what I did.

When the machine finished booting, to my great surprise, the Finder said that I had all my free space back (about 43GB). I've been running those same apps since then and watching Finder like a hawk -- all's well, I've still got my 43GB.

The only new item on the computer was a new widget I installed yesterday. I disabled it, but no guarantee that it was the culprit.

I have a few questions:

1. Is there anything that could give me a clue now as to what was eating the drive? A cursory look at the log files didn't raise any alarms, but I'm no expert.

2. Should it happen again, is there any way of finding out which app is allocating disk space as it's doing it (eg, Activity Monitor)?

3. Any ideas as to what may have happened? Malware? Bug? Precedent?

Thank you very much for any ideas, suggestions, advice, etc.
Ariel

Though I would not touch the folder itself, without repairing permissions when done. Go to Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility to repair permissions.

See this FAQ:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=122973&tstart=10

Hi,

Have you emptied the Trash?

Adrian