Error- Mac Startup Disk is Full You Need to Delete Some Files

Are you getting the below error message on whatever operations you are trying to perform?
Error - "Your Startup Disk is full. You need to delete some files"

Although, you deleted many unwanted files from the hard drive and there is enough space out there, still you keep receiving the error message. Moreover, after certain occurrences of the problem, the system hangs infinitely and you fail to access any data from the drive. In such situations, if you do not have a valid backup of your data in the hard drive, you need to take the help of any third party software to recover Mac data.

It is needless to speak about the advanced features and robustness of Mac. Macs are so neatly designed that many users even believe up to the extent that their Mac will never go wrong. Unfortunately, the actual fact is that there are situations, when your robust Mac also goes down, making all your data in the system hard drive completely inaccessible.

There are a number of reasons which are responsible for the inaccessibility of precious data in the Mac hard drive. Among them, some of the most prominent ones include file system corruption, operating system malfunction, contradiction with newly installed hardware/software etc.

All these problems are indicated by the inaccessibility of data in the hard drive, following  some unusual error messages. In the above discussed problem, while trying to save a new file on the disk, Mac first flashes the error message - "Your Startup Disk is full. You need to delete some files". Sometimes, the error message may also seem weird as it appears, while trying to delete a file or run an application. The error message does not allow you to perform any operation, including opening, moving, deleting, copying of files. Moreover, even if you free a GB or two memory from the hard drive, the error message keep popping up.

This indicates that the problem is not with the available breathing space in your Mac hard drive, rather something related to file system. Mac provides an inbuilt utility, 'Disk Utility' to check and repair various disk errors. Here, you can connect your Mac hard drive to another working machine and run Disk Utility on the troubled hard drive. If the problem still persist, you can also try running the 'fsck' command line utility, which is meant to resolve file system related problems.

However, there are certain instances, when the Mac disk has got severely corrupted and both Disk Utility as well as FSCK utility fails to respond. In such circumstances, you can still recover your precious data by running any Mac data recovery software. These software are completely reliable and with highly interactive graphical user interfaces, quite simple in use.

Dealing with Catalog B-Tree Corruption in Mac OS X to Perform Successful Data Recovery

I recently got Mac OS X and was still a newbie to its file system organization. In the beginning, everything looked fine and I was very happy to use my Mac machine. I copied all the important stuff (i.e. Word files, presentations, and other data) to the new hard drive.

I was using PowerMac G4. But one thing that I noticed lately was horrible. My system had been locking up frequently. I decided to repair permissions and then verify the disk. But the verification process ended up abruptly giving me these errors:

"Invalid extent entry"
"Invalid catalog record type"
"underlying task reported failure on exit"

On rebooting the system, I was greeted with another one stating:

“Reserved fields in the catalog record have incorrect data”

I was screwed up and uncertain whether my problem was disk related or data related. I read something about the catalog records and their role in HFS file system.

As any other storage device, Mac drives are divided into one or more volumes. These volumes consist of files, directories, directory threads and file threads. Mac OS maintains a catalog record for each item stored on the volume This catalog record contains information about the respective item and is placed in the on-disk catalog B-tree. The Finder application searches the catalog B-tree to locate files in the directory.

There is an identification number for each file and directory that very much resembles an inode number in the Unix file system. Each file or directory is recognized by its parent and thus named using the parent’s identification number. This name is used as a search key to the catalog B-tree of the volume.

If the catalog records get corrupt due to some reasons like software application malfunctioning, system crash, etc., all files stored on the Mac hard drive would become inaccessible. I realized that I could be facing a similar issue. Since I was desperate to quickly recover all the lost data, I downloaded and tried the demo versions of various Mac data recovery tools.

This Mac Data Recovery Software was exceptional, It recovered all of my lost or deleted data within minutes, if not seconds. The software also supports recovery from removable media, such as USB drives, memory cards, iPods, etc. Moreover, it is compatible with all Intel based Mac and Power PC.