Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Register Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Mac OSX "Startup Disk Full" Error

Jonathan Stevenson

Jonathan Stevenson

Well-known member
Joined
Nov 20, 2008
Messages
1,829
Reaction score
0
Points
36
Location
Denver
Hey Everyone,

This is VERY off topic of Red but I need your help! I tried to make an appointment at a "Genius" bar, but somehow all the stores in the state are booked through Saturday, I need help now!

Every morning for the last few days, my computer gives me a message saying "Startup disk is full." We've all seen that message. Ok, so I go delete a bunch of crap- photos, old music, videos, what have you. The next day "Startup disk is full." What? Ok... Delete more crap- documents, applications I don't use, email archives. Today- Same story! What's the deal? Every day, my mac somehow loses space to something... I can't find any other significantly sized files that would be taking up my whole drive.

I've downloaded OmniDiskSweeper, which is hardly helpful because I don't know what files are ok to delete or not. Some of these might be important system files or something. I've read in some other forums that my computer might not be emptying it's caches properly or something to do with the console log, but I can't get any clear explanations.

Anyone have any advice? Thanks for any help!

Picture1-1.png
120GB stock hard drive, Mac Pro early 2007
 
I had this problem with my macbook pro so I downloaded WhatSize, which scans your hard drive and tells exactly how big all of your folders or docs are. In this program I found my render files were taking up about 60 gigs and that was just for one project. So I deleted a bunch of those from earlier renders and opened up about 45 gigs then I deselected auto render in final cut because that was what was killing me.

I have no idea how to access those render folders another way. I tried looking for them through finder but I can never get to them. Whatsize helped me there.
 
I use DiskInventoryX

At any rate - google the terminal command for showing hidden files in OSX. In the past, I've had aborted renders or transcodes saved as hidden and huge files on my system drive.

All in all, another reason never to use your system drive for anything other than apps....
 
Here's what's happening... You only have 2 GB's of RAM. Simply put, that's not enough for OSX. When you start running programs the OS runs out of ram and has to do something. So what it does is take the oldest thing running in the memory and writes it out to the hard drive. Let's say you have FCP running and then start Photoshop. If FCP has been running for a while and it's not be accessed, OSX will take the information that FCP has in the RAM and write it to the hard drive.

Here's your options...get more ram. Max out what your computer can take. 4gb will be more than 2x faster feeling than 2gb. 6gb+ will be a totally different computer. Restart more often. In fact, if you only have 2 GB of ram, I would suggest restarting at least once a day. Take a look at this: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/OSX/OS_x_swapfile_sizes.html

Matthew
 
Thanks everyone for your advice. Matthew, I don't understand the 2GB of Ram theory because I've had this computer for 2 years and it's never acted this way?

The other weird thing is that I can literally WATCH my hard disk fill up. It looses a few hundred Mb's about every hour. Meaning there's some kind of file that's like... repeating itself or creating unnecessary cache or something?

I did OmniDiskSweeper and found the biggest files to be under var/log/asl. Is this something I can delete? It's 12.4 GB...
 
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20090122213555897

This may be the issue you're having.

EDIT: If it doesn't make much sense, basically the part of OS X responsible for logging errors and problems is stuck in some sort of loop and is spewing a few hundred megs of log file per hour. Hopefully stopping it, removing the log, and starting it again fixes the issue.
 
Cail Young said:
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20090122213555897

This may be the issue you're having.

EDIT: If it doesn't make much sense, basically the part of OS X responsible for logging errors and problems is stuck in some sort of loop and is spewing a few hundred megs of log file per hour. Hopefully stopping it, removing the log, and starting it again fixes the issue.
Click to expand...
This fix seemed to work temporarily. I deleted the 12GB asl file and it certainly cleared my hard drive but it's continuing to "loop" the log files as my hard disk space is still slowly filling up as before. Now it looses 100MB about every 10 minutes! Nuts....

Any other ideas?
 
open up the terminal and run "top". It will let you see what's running on your computer. Hopefully, you can see some process that's going which might be writing to the log file.

Did you look to see what size your swap files are? If you are using your computer even slightly heavy you can lose GB's per hour in swap files. Basically, each time you have to cycle what's in the RAM, it will make another 80MB swap file. A good way to see if you are getting a lot of swap files is to run top in terminal and look to see how many pageouts you have. I've got 10GB's of ram an after 7 days of being up, I've got pageouts-which means it's time to restart.

Matthew
 
Jonathan Stevenson said:
Any other ideas?
Click to expand...

The ASL files are the system logs, OS X is writing error messages there.
You need to find out what errors are occurring.

open up Terminal and type this:

syslog /var/log/asl/2009.03.25.asl | tail


you should see the last 10 or so messages written to the log.
(To see more messages, use "tail -n 50" and it will show the last 50 lines...)
 
Easy fix, I would say almost guaranteed to work:

Back up your files.
Format your boot drive.
Re-install the OS.
Put your files back on.

I do this every 6 months or so, and it keeps things running tickety-boo. A good cure-all for weird things like this.

(Also, this is a rare tip that works equally well on PC or Mac...)
 
Charles Angus said:
Easy fix, I would say almost guaranteed to work:

Back up your files.
Format your boot drive.
Re-install the OS.
Put your files back on.

I do this every 6 months or so, and it keeps things running tickety-boo. A good cure-all for weird things like this.

(Also, this is a rare tip that works equally well on PC or Mac...)
Click to expand...
I like this approach. Somehow it feelts more... American? :)

But really, thanks everyone. I'll give these last few tips a try and see what I come up with! I'll report back this afternoon.
 
Hey everyone,

I think I found the culprit!! Safari 4... I installed the beta last week, which makes sense because the issue started around Saturday. I was watching processes in Terminal and the biggest one had something to do with some kind of log for Safari! I emptied my asl logs again, restarted my computer, and haven't opened Safari for the whole morning. So far, no lost in hard disk space or slow processing. My laptop is a lot cooler now too, that thing was scorching hot yesterday...

So, I'm pretty positive there's some bug in the beta that's causing the issue. If anyone can corroborate this, that'd be awesome. Thanks for your help everyone!
 
I have confirmed for sure that it's Safari 4. When I open the program, my hard disk immediately starts losing Mb's. It's stops when I close it.

Guess I'll stick with Firefox!! Thanks for the help everyone.
 
Resurrecting and old thread here...

My start up disk is having this same problem again where it must be writing error messages somewhere on my drive, filling it up endlessly. I re-read this thread, followed everyone's advice again. This time, in my Terminal, I'm finding these errors in the ASL log...

Screenshot2010-03-02at71845PM.png


Can anyone direct me to a way to find where these error messages are being generated and stop them? Thanks a lot everyone. You're the only tech-savvy mac folks I know, so I apologize for this not being Red-related.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top