Start Up Disc Full

[Hemibee]

I recently had a HD failure on my Mac with 1 TB HD. I had the HD replaced and they were able to save most of files and such on the old HD. HD files were copied to an external 3TB HD.

The first time the system was booted up I got the message the Start Up Disc was full so I removed several gigs of files. I then set up the external HD for back up use with Time Machine. System seemed good on the first boot up after getting the Time Machine set up. Now I'm once again getting the same error message. Deleted additional files, several more gigs since they were available on the external I didn't need them on the computer.

I was downloading my Virus program, Avast and the program hung up, I thought I had ended/aborted the download but apparently I did not. Now I can not get the Mac to reboot. The first attempt to reboot said once again the Start Up Disc was full. Now the Mac comes up to the log in screen, enter password and the screen goes gray an I can not get past this screen.

How to I get around this to see if the Avast is still trying to download or if there is another issue?

I am currently running Mountain Lion as my OS. The Mac is a 4 years old iMac 24 inch 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x2GB machine

Thanks for any assistance you can give me.

Tony

 

[Hemibee]

I was finally able to get into the disk utility, now can I now erase some of the files to correct the full disk.

 

[Hemibee]

Never mind, I figured it out, working to make room now.

 

[Kaveman]

If you use iPhoto, don't forget it has its own Empty Trash command

 

[oldscribe]

Hi,

I was downloading my Virus program, Avast

Have you boot camped or using Parallels Desktop for Mac?

 

[Hemibee]

All is good now. Found during the restore (either me or the Apple Genius) my GoPro photos had somehow been added three times in separate folders. Cleared those out and now I have 500GB of free HD space.

If you use iPhoto, don't forget it has its own Empty Trash command

That was one of the hardest things to learn, never hurts to be reminded from time to time.

Hi,
Have you boot camped or using Parallels Desktop for Mac?

I was finally able to get it to boot up in Safe Mode and then took care of the memory issue.