[edhaine]

I have a 3 year old eMac with OS 10.3.9, 256mb of ram and a combo drive

The problem is when I try and insert a blank CD-R an error saying "Burning the disc cannot proceed because the startup disk does not have enough empty space" but the thing is I DO have enough empty space, about 2 gigs! This is very frustrating!

Are there any ways to fix this at all?

[Jeep2000]

That's odd. Does the computer maybe not "know" what startup disk to use? If you go to System Preferences and click on Startup Disk, is your drive highlighted (takes a few seconds to scan for disks)?

[Gossamer]

Actually 2 gigs isn't very much at all. As a general rule of thumb you usually want to leave about 25% of your drive's space open for swapping and other temp files. If it gets too full you start seeing a performance hit. If my sources are correct the eMac came with at least a 40gig HD, meaning you're using up about 95% of your hard drive space. I would highly recommend getting a bigger hard drive!