start up failure after "disc full"

[mayaman9]

All help very gratefully received, this prob happened last Fri, still have no solution

OK I have a emac 60GB, running OSX10.38, disk space nearly full so bought 250GD Lacie external HD which is on all the time.
I moved music (itunes) to one partitioned part, about 27GB.
I moved pics (iphoto) to another 13GB free.
This freed up lots of space, obviously.
Mac works fine for 3 weeks.
Then on Good Friday (?) after a large transfer of photos, I suddenly got a message saying that only had 700MB left on emac HD.

I MAY have copied photo and musicv files on to internal HD by mistake. NOt certain but a possiblity

NOt even enough memory to boot up emac! Arrggh.

With a friend's help managed to boot up using my external HD and install disc (which is only 10.2 BTW, repair store upgraded OS for me a while back so don't have 10.3 disk). More headaches.


I have managed to get into my emac HD and delete photos, emptied waste. Ditto with music. Emptied. Now HD shows 44GB free.

But internal emac HD won't start up! Grey two-tone screen saying restart..
Tried the fsck -f route no good, says "No problems were found..."

Tried all advice on apple site, cache out, unplugged all periferals, restarted with shift key.

No good no good no good.

I do not run ishock

Sd I really start taking out the extra RAM?? and restarting

I've checked with whatsize software and def 44GB free on my internal drive
Is my HD at fault? All help very much appreciated.

I have set system pref to start with internal HD, no good.

Tech friend is now on one week vacation, I have deadlines and editors screaming for text...
thanks for all advice
IAin
emac; Mac OS X (10.3.8); 60GB, 768RAM, 250GB. external HD

 

[Viro]

If you have Diskwarrior, that might help. It detects more problems than both fsck and Disk Utility.

You might have to reinstall the OS. With Mac OS X, if there isn't enough free space, bad things can happen. There was a thread on here not too long ago, when I asked how necessary it was to follow the "leave 15% hard disc space free" rule. Turns out it was a soft limit, meaning you should follow it but you can be safe by leaving at least a few GB free. Free space is needed for the swap files, and if there isn't enough free space, bad things can happen.

The quickest way to solve the problem, IMHO is to just do a clean install. Back up your data to the external drive, reformat your eMac's hard drive and install OS X. Once installed, copy everything back to the internal drive. The whole process should take under 2 hours and will be IMHO much faster than trying to figure out what's wrong and if it can be fixed.

 

[sinclair_tm]

how much ram do you have? i got 512mb ram and 10.2.8 running on a 3gig hd with less then 700mb left, and it runs just fine, i have never had a hd full or out of mem error, there has to be something wrong somewhere else. being you cleaned it with the ext hd, i assume that it mounted and you could navigate it, so the surface is okay, maybe you have some tables bad, and disk warrior should get that. as far as your writings, why can't you get those while booting from the ext hd?