Serious bug: "Startup disk almost full"?

[baryon]

I just got the "Your startup disk is almost full" message, and I installed Mountain Lion 2 days ago. In the Finder, I can see that there is over 60 GB of free space on my startup disk, though I'm sure there was about 20 GB free when I upgraded to Mountain Lion. I don't know where that 40 GB went, but now I get this message which leads me to believe that my startup disk is actually full (it would make sense). But how come Finder is showing 60 GB free, this can't be true!

Can anyone check if Finder displays free disk space properly under Mountain Lion? This is really strange…

 

[50548]

I just got the "Your startup disk is almost full" message, and I installed Mountain Lion 2 days ago. In the Finder, I can see that there is over 60 GB of free space on my startup disk, though I'm sure there was about 20 GB free when I upgraded to Mountain Lion. I don't know where that 40 GB went, but now I get this message which leads me to believe that my startup disk is actually full (it would make sense). But how come Finder is showing 60 GB free, this can't be true!

Can anyone check if Finder displays free disk space properly under Mountain Lion? This is really strange…

View attachment 350348

It may the NASTY iMessages bug that eats up all your memory and then moves on to eat your startup disk space...check your activity monitor.

 

[baryon]

It may the NASTY iMessages bug that eats up all your memory and then moves on to eat your startup disk space...check your activity monitor.

Hmm, I don't use iMessages, though I know it runs in the background anyway. What should I look for in Activity Monitor, should it be something that takes up lots of RAM or lots of Virtual Memory, is there a process name I should look for?

The strangest thing is that Finder keeps showing that I have 60 GB free, which is very unlikely. So I'm more inclined to believe that I'm really running out of space, but then why isn't Finder agreeing with that?

 

[steve-p]

What does it say if you do About This Mac : More info... : Storage

 

[baryon]

What does it say if you do About This Mac : More info... : Storage

And this is after a reboot, and I also checked with Grand Perspective and they all seem to agree: there is about 60 GB of free space. Why did I get that low disk space notification, and how did 40 GB magically disappear form my system during the upgrade from Lion to ML?

 

[50548]

View attachment 350350

And this is after a reboot, and I also checked with Grand Perspective and they all seem to agree: there is about 60 GB of free space. Why did I get that low disk space notification, and how did 40 GB magically disappear form my system during the upgrade from Lion to ML?

Aren't you talking about temporary disk space required for installation?

 

[steve-p]

It sounds like it was just a glitch of unknown origin. I haven't heard anyone else mention anything similar.

The space increasing after an upgrade has been mentioned by a few people. It's likely that it was old installation files no longer needed, pre-ML caches, TM local backups, etc. 40GB seems like a lot though. I didn't notice much change on my system but I have enough free space not to monitor it.

 

[pcrislip]

Just saw the same thing...

I was working on a brand new MacBook Air 13 - Corei7 2.0 - 512 SSD.

User was working on e-mail. The user then received the Startup Disk was full message. Upon checking the laptop, it was showing 197 GB in the Other catagory. Finder and Disk Utility showed only 73 GB used. The user had opened up iMessage and then closed it at one point while working on mail. After the restart, the laptop showed only 73 GB in use and did not show this message again. Thoughts?

 

[cpants]

start up disk full

View attachment 350350

And this is after a reboot, and I also checked with Grand Perspective and they all seem to agree: there is about 60 GB of free space. Why did I get that low disk space notification, and how did 40 GB magically disappear form my system during the upgrade from Lion to ML?

hi im having the same issues... how did you resolve this?

 

[baryon]

The issue has resolved itself "on its own" apparently, as I have not done anything at all to fix it and I have not had any problems since. There was indeed a lot more free disk space after I installed ML, and it stayed that way (I still don't know how that much data disappeared from my system, but I'm not missing any files). Maybe Lion had some data accumulated like Cache files or leftover virtual memory that never got cleared…

I didn't get the disk space message for a long time now, so maybe it was some kind of memory leak in Photoshop or something that caused the RAM to overflow into virtual memory (maybe this wasn't detected by the system as "used disk space").