Warning Startup Disk has no more room

[class77]

This morning I got up and woke my computer up and got the warning "Your Mac OSX startup disk has no more space available for applications memory". The only things open were Firefox(1 tab),Mail and Finder. I shut the whole computer down, let it sit for a minute and start back up. I didn't get the warning, but got the spinning wheel of death when I tried to reopen mail and firefox.

Something is dreadfully wrong, but I don't know what is dying. Can anybody give me a course of action and tell me what is happening? Is it hard drive, RAM or what? I have Apple Care and it's less than 2 years old, so I'm not worried about longterm, just want to get this fixed.

Checked the activity monitor: System Memory-4 GB total-2.73 free; Disk usage 131 G used, 868 G Free....

 

[walterwhite]

boot from an external HD or the DVD that it came with (#1 DVD) and check it via Disk Utility. You can also do some diagnostics ... the HD may think it is running out of space but it actually isnt, but could need to be reformatted to fix. If Disk Utility doesnt fix it... backup your data, reformat the drive and reinstall from the OS and move your data back. If it fails somewhere in that process, the drive is more than likely bad.

 

[class77]

Thanks. I went back in, booted up from install disk and repaired Disk and permission. Nothing was found....Perhaps the drive is going bad

 

[Austinjwalker]

Anytime that's happened to me, my hard drive was full and id have to move some folders to my drobo. How much do you have left on it?

 

[class77]

Anytime that's happened to me, my hard drive was full and id have to move some folders to my drobo. How much do you have left on it?

Disk is nowhere near full. As I said in the original post, there's 868 Gigs of free space left on the 1 terabyte disk. The only thing I can come up with a bad disk, but maybe I'm overlooking something

 

[phlydude]

Sounds like a bad HD to me...just make sure you back it up ASAP

 

[class77]

Sounds like a bad HD to me...just make sure you back it up ASAP

Hopefully my Time Machine will have everything covered. How will I know when the HD finally goes, it just won't boot up at all? Should I be calling Apple support everytime it gives me this warning to form a basis for getting a new HD from Apple Care? Shoot, if they'd offer me a discount on a new iMac instead of fixing it, I go for it