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MauroCol · Dec 27, 2002, 11:48 AM

It's one of the stranger issues I have had in my 13 Mac-user years. When I'm working in my iMac 600 with Jaguar 10.2.3, suddenly I lost the hard disk space. (I can see that it remains more than 200-340 MB, but if I want duplicate a 4K file, I can't because "The operation cannot be completed because the disk is full".

Then, the system gets slow, and if I restart (closing Mozilla and the other apps), I have lost Finder and some System preferences, Mozilla prefs (fortunately, I had a Bookmarks file of 15 days ago, but all passwords, cookies and prefs are lost).

The first time, I thank that it was a simple System fail, but it happened yesterday six times in eight hours.

I revised the System and the disk with Apple System Profiler, Process Viewer, Disk Utility, Drive 10, and all appears in order. Could it be a virus? What can it be?

I haven't see NOTHING in this forum or the Internet or the Apple Website... PLEASE!!!

Thanks in advance!

aaanorton · Dec 27, 2002, 11:53 AM

Get a larger drive.

MauroCol · Dec 27, 2002, 12:01 PM

Thanks, AaaNorton...

Do you think it? With Mac OS 7, 8, 9 and X "pre-Jaguar" I have been with less than 20 MB without that issue...

I will try it and see you...

More suggestions welcome! ;-)

chris v · Dec 27, 2002, 12:12 PM

If you run a lot of memory-hogging apps, you can end up with a couple hundred MB of swap files in no time flat. Have you restarted to see if that clears it out?

How much RAM do you have?

CV

piracy · Dec 27, 2002, 01:43 PM

When you get down to about 500MB or less of free drive space with Mac OS X, very strange things can start to happen.

Go into Terminal, and type 'df -k'. If your primary filesystem (the one that says "Mounted on /") is more than 95% full, you need to think about either freeing up space, or getting a bigger disk.

(Also, you could be having filesystem problems in addition to the lack of space. You may want to boot from your Mac OS X CD and run Disk Utility on the drive, or boot into single-user mode and run fsck -y if you feel comfortable with that method.)

tooki · Dec 27, 2002, 01:52 PM

This is a known issue with OS X. When you don't have as much RAM as it would like, it starts using virtual memory, which uses hard drive space. Then, if the drive reaches around 50MB free, the system reserves those for virtual memory, and tells applications that the disk is full. When you go quit an application (or do anything else that causes an application to try and write its preferences), then it tries to write a new preferences file over the old one, but it's told that there is no room, and that the write failed. And somehow, that also makes the old prefs file disappear.

So yeah, get more RAM and get more disk space.

tooki

MauroCol · Dec 27, 2002, 03:27 PM

Thank you all!

I'm surprised, because I didn't know that it's a "well known issue" with Mac OS X. Well, nothing is perfect, and it's an issue that we didn't have and Windows always has...

What it's incredible is that I have 320 MB of RAM, the partition had more than 300 MB free, and that I only was surfing with Mozilla and checking my e-mail with Entourage...

Well, I translated some files and I have 1 GB free now, I'm almost sure that it will "fix" this "bug".

Thanks again, best regards and happy 2003!!!

Cipher13 · Dec 27, 2002, 11:32 PM

With 225 MB of space left yesterday, I couldn't copy a 7 meg file. That's cool. However - I've been losing preferences quite frequently under 10.2.3 - I never had this issue before, and have not installed anything else since 10.2.3. Not happy Jan.

MauroCol · Dec 27, 2002, 11:54 PM

Hi, Cipher13! If you, a "clinically insane" and famous member of the MacNN Forums, didn't suffered it before, I suppose that it isn't a "well known issue"...

I am not happy with your preferences lost but I'm better because I'm not alone.

Well, if the solution is to have 1 or 2 GB free, we doesn't have problem with it, but APPLE SHOULD SPEAK ABOUT IT!!!

Thanks, happy new year and God bless you!

Xeo · Feb 5, 2003, 12:26 AM

Well, I'm having the same issue now. I think it's a hard drive space issue. I'm at 97% capacity on my iBook. It's not as easy for me to get a bigger drive. Luckily I don't need to keep all this stuff on here.

An hour ago, I was to the point where a download of mine stopped because I ran out of space. The Finder reported 20 MB left but it wouldn't download. Then, I deleted 140 MB of files only to have the space shrink even more, even after emptying the trash!! After a restart I'm up to 350 MB.

I guess I need to keep at least 500 MB open on here. Especially since I only have 384 MB RAM.

smeger · Feb 5, 2003, 01:58 AM

I'll chime in on this one, too. At best, I've got about 350MB available. I begin to see problems such as disappearing prefs when I drop down to about 100MB.

The really fun one was when I was testing some software that needs to allocate hundreds of megs of memory at a time. The system was swapping so hard I couldn't run ps to find the process ID to kill the process. Yick...