Hatrack River Forum: Help w/ a computer problem...

This is topic Help w/ a computer problem... in forum Books, Films, Food and Culture at Hatrack River Forum.

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Posted by Kasie H (Member # 2120) on :

My grandfather has an iMac G5 that's giving him trouble:

quote:
..my computer keeps telling me that " your
startup disc is almost full, make space available"

How do I fix this for him? I've never encountered it before...

Posted by TheTick (Member # 2883) on :

I'm assuming the startup disk has space available? [Smile]

Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :

Has he actually checked his available free space?

Posted by TheTick (Member # 2883) on :

If there is plenty of free space, when does the error occur? Right at startup, or after the system's been running for a while?

Posted by Kasie H (Member # 2120) on :

...there's no way he's filled the whole hard disk. I refuse to believe it. It's 80 GB and the man uses the computer for solitaire, email, and the occasional Word document. There's something up, I'm not sure what.

Tick,
Don't know. I'll ask.

Posted by TheTick (Member # 2883) on :

That's what I figured, just wanted to be sure. [Smile]

He may need to run the disk utility to repair the disk, something like that can happen when the file structure gets a little funny.

Posted by Kasie H (Member # 2120) on :

Okay, I'll tell him to do that...thanks Tick.

Posted by TheTick (Member # 2883) on :

No prob. If that isn't it, perhaps our mac gurus can check in and give some more advice. You may want to put that it's for a mac in the title if they don't see it soon. [Wink]

Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :

He likely has too little RAM, and is leaving a program with a memory leak running.

His virtual memory is filling up pages, almost certainly.

Posted by Glenn Arnold (Member # 3192) on :

The IMac G5 runs on OS X. Check system preferences and look for the startup disk panel. If there are more than one startup disk available, it might be that one of them is on a small partition.

That sounds unlikely if he just uses it the way you say, but I agree that it isn't likely he's filled up 80GB, unless he's downloading movies or something.

It might also be set for network startup, but if there is no network available it should just go to the main hard drive.