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Haliburton · Aug 20, 2006, 09:17 PM

A number of the replies to the original post
http://forums.macnn.com/90/mac-os-x/...-but-disk-not/
refer to the dangers of a startup disk being almost full.

I have an external SATA Seagate 300GB in a Vantec eSATA / USB2 housing (eSATA promises to cream FW800, so I don't regret too much the lack of FireWire in this case).

I've split the drive into a number of 25GB partitions, and most everything is lovely... except one of these pattitions won't let me write anything more to it (error -36. ie. disk full), even though I have 490-plus MB free +/- 8 MB depending on whether I turn journalling off or on with TechTools 4.

FileBuddy reveals no big hidden files, the partition is not used for swap files by the OS or Photoshop, TechTools and DiskUtility report healthy volume structure . . . the only thing I can't do is run DiskWarrior on it because DW 3.0.3 doesn't see these USB volumes on either the motherboard USB or PCI USB2 bus on Ye Olde G4 Dual 500, and DW doesn't run at all on my MBP 2.0 (hello, Alsoft ? a Universal version of DiskWarrior is way overdue... your site
Alsoft: The Utility Company celebrates an anniversary from November 2005).

So, back to the problem: I can see OS X (10.4.7 in this case) setting aside a safety margin on a boot disk, but golly, this is half a gig I can't use on a partition that will completely contain a project if I can write another 300-400 MB to it.

Can anyone suggest whassup ?

- - e r i k - - · Aug 21, 2006, 02:01 AM

What's your reason for partitioning? Just curious that's all.

Laurence · Aug 21, 2006, 12:27 PM

Photoshop/FCP/etc. scratch disk storage??? Try repairing the disk with disk utility. copy all the data to a different partition and format this one. Then copy the data back. 25 GB should copy in about 10 minutes or so. You could also type this into the terminal... "sudo du /Volumes/drivename > ~/Desktop/diskusage.txt" without the quotes. That will create a text file with disk usage information.

I second the question about why you're doing this? I usually use folders to organize projects. In fact I wish there was an easy way to combine all the drives into one logical drive. (Thats why I'm hoping for a ZFS-like filesystem in 10.5 or at least 10.6)

Tsilou B. · Aug 22, 2006, 07:02 AM

What does

df -h

in the Terminal show? Sometimes the Finder gets confused, but this Terminal command will always show the correct numbers as long as the hard drive structure is ok.

Haliburton · Aug 22, 2006, 11:08 AM

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - -

What's your reason for partitioning? Just curious that's all.

Vastly reduces disk fragmentation, allows me to have Win-formatted partitions too, allows me to back up entire partitions to DVD HD . . . though it looks as though I may double that with BluRay if that format is successful.

Haliburton · Aug 22, 2006, 11:40 AM

Originally Posted by Laurence

Photoshop/FCP/etc. scratch disk storage??? Try repairing the disk with disk utility.

FileBuddy reveals no big hidden files, the partition is not used for swap files by the OS or Photoshop, TechTools and DiskUtility report healthy volume structure . . .

Originally Posted by Laurence

copy all the data to a different partition and format this one. Then copy the data back. 25 GB should copy in about 10 minutes or so.

That's cool - hadn't thought of that . . . lessee if I have another 25 GB free and I'll try that, thanks.

Originally Posted by Laurence

You could also type this into the terminal... "sudo du /Volumes/drivename > ~/Desktop/diskusage.txt" without the quotes. That will create a text file with disk usage information.

Thanks, I didn't know that one.

Originally Posted by Laurence

I second the question about why you're doing this? I usually use folders to organize projects. In fact I wish there was an easy way to combine all the drives into one logical drive. (Thats why I'm hoping for a ZFS-like filesystem in 10.5 or at least 10.6)

Already answered above... and in addition, it allows me to constrain scratch-disk use to specific volumes.

I too, look forward to more robust file systems in upcoming versions of OS X

Originally Posted by Tsilou B.

What does df -h in the Terminal show?

Sounds even quicker than Laurence's method. Show the same free space as the Finder does, to the nearest 10th of a gig.

BTW I have another partition with about the same amount of free space, and have the same problem with the Finder, Photoshop and Adobe Bridge not being able to write to it.

So, it seems to be a system-level setting of some kind: on a 25 GB volume, we're not goung to allow you to have any less than about 0.5 GB free.

That's about as annoying as OS X setting aside a hidden 40 MB or so on a CD for itself (icons and such?), and ¿ a similar proportion of DVDs ?

- - e r i k - - · Aug 22, 2006, 11:52 PM

Originally Posted by Haliburton

Vastly reduces disk fragmentation, allows me to have Win-formatted partitions too, allows me to back up entire partitions to DVD HD . . . though it looks as though I may double that with BluRay if that format is successful.

That was once true back in the days. But disk fragmentation is a problem of the olden days of OS 9 and vastly less so than the inconveniencing of having multiple partitions.

The only legitimate use for partitioning in these days is for different OSes, mostly used by developers. And of course as you say for Windows. But backing up? I really don't see any convenience there.

Haliburton · Aug 23, 2006, 01:29 PM

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - -

That was once true back in the days. <snip>

Well, it works well for me.

Back to the point of this thread: Why does it seem that Apple is forcing one (not just I?) to keep half a gig free on a 25 GB volume of data, not dissimilarly from the 700 MB blank CD that the Finder shows as having about 650 MB available, while in toast all 701 MB are available?

I've reproduced this problem on 2 different volumes of the same size, with entirely different data.

Tsilou B. · Aug 23, 2006, 04:23 PM

It's definitely no general problem in Tiger. On one of my Macs running Tiger (a very old PB G3), I have two partitions, one of them has about 50MB free space, the other one about 200MB. I often get warnings on that machine, but I've never experienced your problems.
That's why I assumed that the Finder displayed wrong numbers. But since df outputs the same values - I really have no idea what's going on.

Haliburton · Aug 24, 2006, 09:47 PM

Originally Posted by Tsilou B.

It's definitely no general problem in Tiger. On one of my Macs running Tiger (a very old PB G3), I have two partitions, one of them has about 50MB free space, the other one about 200MB. I often get warnings on that machine, but I've never experienced your problems.
That's why I assumed that the Finder displayed wrong numbers. But since df outputs the same values - I really have no idea what's going on.

hi Tsilou,

Yeah, it sure is odd... I wonder if (it it is in fact) the reserved portion of the HD is proportional to the volume size.

It just seems fishily similar to the missing (reserved) space on blank CDs that I mentioned... like the OS is setting aside space for its own housekeeping.

Can anyone else duplicate it ?

Create a partition of any number of GB (perhaps easiest on an external drive) and see if you can fill it right up.

It's happened to me twice so far as mentioned, methinks I'll try again on yet another drive when I get one later this month.

Hal

sunshinebusride · Aug 27, 2006, 11:16 PM

hello, i've joined this forum to see if i can get some help with a severe problem that brings up the "Disk Full Alert!!" dialogue, telling me there isn't enough room on the disks to continue running applications, etc.

trouble is, no matter how few programs i have running (safari + the finder running alone will being this error up after a while) i cannot seem to stop the computer from freezing up and bringing up this message. im running a 1-year-old ibook... i could grab the rest of the specs but believe me... it should be fast enough to run safari.

EDIT: there are 6.5 gigabytes of free space on the HD

CatOne · Aug 28, 2006, 05:54 PM

LOL.

500 MB of hard disk space is, unfortunately, nothing.

Your machine has more RAM than this!

What's happening is you *are* effectively out of disk space. OS X is a modern OS and has virtual memory. When you want to load more applicaitions into RAM than you have free RAM, the OS will write stuff out to disk. It does this in "pages," which are on the order of the amount of RAM you have in the machine (sometimes more).

So 512 MB of free space on the HD would be woefully insufficient. Frankly, it's a bad idea to ever run a disk more than 80% full in regular use for other reasons. Basically your partition scheme is a mess. I can see a few partitions, but 8 is pushing it, and you're running out of space. You'll need to think of a beter way, because you should always have 3-4 GB of empty space on every partition, unless you're not booting from it and not using it other than for archiving to.

Johnny B · Aug 14, 2007, 02:32 PM

I agree that having 500kb available means you have basically nothing. But I'm getting the Startup disk full warning asking me to force quit applications and here is my situation:

G4 with 2-3 aps running. I've got a 120gb HD with 66 GB available. My trash is empty. It's got 1.5 GB of SDram and a 2mb L3 cache.

Any clue what's going on?...or how to tell someone who is not computer saavy how to fix this

MacosNerd · Aug 14, 2007, 08:15 PM

Dude why are you resurrecting old threads

frdmfghtr · Aug 14, 2007, 09:37 PM

Since it's been resurrected...

Reboot using the Recovery disc and run Disk Utility to repair the volume. Perhaps there is something askew that is causing the error. You have to boot off the recovery disc in order to repair the startup volume.

Curiosity · Aug 15, 2007, 12:36 AM

Originally Posted by Haliburton

Well, it works well for me.

Back to the point of this thread: Why does it seem that Apple is forcing one (not just I?) to keep half a gig free on a 25 GB volume of data, not dissimilarly from the 700 MB blank CD that the Finder shows as having about 650 MB available, while in toast all 701 MB are available?

Have you forgotten that formatting and mapping of directories takes some space? The system has to be able to find files that are stored, so it has to format the space and map the files to that space.

Johnny B · Aug 15, 2007, 01:03 AM

Hey guys....Sorry. I'm new to the forums. I wasn't up on the etiquette. Thanks thought for the breif resurection on my behalf. I'll try your suggestions and will be more mindful in the future so as to not go "against the grain".

Johnny B

Johnny B · Aug 17, 2007, 10:05 AM

The message is saying I am running out of application memory and ask me to close aps. I have only 2 aps running. So upon doing more research...a friend had me run the "Actvity Monitor". Although my HD has 40gb available...when my aps are working, under system memory it shows as low as 25mb. Here are the other specs.
129mb wired
779mb active
475mb inactive
1.35gb used
151mb free (this drops much lower when my aps are working)
7.36 VM

Can someone talk to me like I'm a 6yr old and help me out. I obviously know very little about forums and even less about the workings of my Mac. I need step by step instructions.

Thanks in advace. I really appreciate everyones help and patience with me!!