Disk is Full, mac crashes

Just so it is clear, the Mac needs those 9GB on the boot drive (the one containing your system files), that's why clearing up space on the Windows partition (not part of the Mac boot drive) didn't help, nor did having all that free space on the external drive once the internal drive was full.

If you do not have an extra boot drive you can try a few things. One is to start up in Safe Mode.

Mac OS X: Starting up in Safe Mode - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1455

What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode? (Mac OS X) - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1564

This will clear off some temporary files which will build up again but will give you maybe enough room to start up and move a bunch of files to another drive (and empty the trash!)

Alternatively, depending upon which operating system version you use you may be able to boot off your rescue partition and access basic tools to again let you copy enough files to a different drive so you can start up your computer.

Using any of the above methods may help but note you may also have directory corruption so definitely verify your hard drive with Disk Utility.

A Mac needs about 9GB of disk space free to start and run effectively.

I suggest you buy a new drive, Install Mac OS X on it from fundamental sources, and then use it to rescue your data.

The Mac does not use any special places for the Boot Drive, you can start from any appropriate source of software.

Quote:

. I have bootcamp so I restart again and went to windows (I can use windows wihtout problem) and I can see I only have 250 mb free ( mac was doing some actualizations too) so I dont know whats the problem, I cant use mac because of that and Im kind of freaking out.I tried to earase files from windows but it wont let me do it.

They were trying to delete files on HFS+ and only has read access, NOT to delete Windows files.

You can, and the demo is full featured or buy it for $19 and have HFS+ driver for Windows -

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/hfs-windows/

I totally disagree with the 9GB or 9% as SSDs need more, and it depends on the number of files, the directory, the fragmentation of free space (that does not get consolidated - something you had to do when installing Windows possibly to create a partition. And a 2TB drive may need even more. 70% for a data drive for video editing; I aim for 50% on boot drives; and scratch volumes should be erased between projects. You can have a drive that is only 40% used but some items are at the end of the drive and cause longer head seeks.

All reasons why an SSD with its near zero latency, and seeks, and ultra high IO per sec are giving great performance to systems new and old. And an SSD with multi-channel controllers actually is acting like a RAID but hidden from the user as it does concurrent I/O's

start up disk full

Re: Help! Startup disc full. Can't start at all!