iMac iMac crashing hard, could it be low on disk space on boot drive?

[Rafagon]

Greetings! The past couple of days my iMac has been crashing unexplainably. Mail.app crashes, Messages.app crashes, iTunes.app crashes, you name it. Within minutes, my iMac is at sub-zero freezing temperatures and the only way out of this is by doing the dreaded power-down (with the actual power button, yikes!) and restarting. It then functions normally for about five minutes before doing it all over again.

So I remembered reading somewhere that low available disk space on the boot drive could cause problems. This is totally understandable, so I've been moving all my huge files to my external drive and I haven't had to reboot now in approximately 30 minutes.

Is it possible that the low disk space on the boot drive to blame? At this point it's seeming like a very plausible explanation, but, what confounds me is that OS X never gave a single warning about "Running Low on Disk Space, please clear some space, etc., etc."

Does anyone know if this is what low available disk space on the boot drive causes? Dozens of crashes WITHOUT warnings about low disk space?

Thanks for any and all help,

Rafael

 

[liberated]

It may be a failing drive, I'd replace the drive and reinstall OSX


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[Europa]

Have you done any troubleshooting? I'd start with Disk Utility and verify and repair disk permissions.

 

[liberated]

Have you done any troubleshooting? I'd start with Disk Utility and verify and repair disk permissions.

I guess I skipped the basic, I've always been partial to the "nuclear" option lol


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[Rafagon]

Thanks you both very much! After clearing 200GB+ from the boot drive earlier today, it's been working well. It remains to be seen whether I'm out of the woods for good. If things get rough again, I'll follow the steps you guys suggested to me.

 

[Rafagon]

Have you done any troubleshooting? I'd start with Disk Utility and verify and repair disk permissions.

Thanks for your earlier tip about repairing permissions! I did it--twice--but apparently the problem persists. One of the Finder crash reports mentioned something to the effect that Finder crashed while using the "Dropbox Component blah blah blah." So I started Googling around and I see lots of incidents reported by others about Dropbox being the culprit. I will have to send an e-mail to Dropbox to inform them of what's being going on.... I really liked Dropbox, but hey, Skydrive seems to be just as qualified.

Here's just one of several articles mentioning these Dropbox crashes:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3768164?start=0&tstart=0

So I'm getting rid of Dropbox and going for SkyDrive, which I have tons more storage with them anyways, since that's what they gave to veteran users of Skydrive... I think it was 15GB or 25GB if memory serves me right.

On my MBA, Dropbox has caused NO crashing problems at all, so I already moved my important stuff out of Dropbox and onto my MBA's hard drive, and will re-upload it all back to SkyDrive.

What I keep on finding interesting is that the repeated crashes only happen after a cold boot. They resolve an hour after boot-up, for reasons I can't explain. If I Sleep my iMac and then wake the next morning, none of those problems are present. In any case, a lot of people recommend sleeping your computer and some even recommend leaving it on all the time, to save wear and tear on the HD, so maybe I'll become one of those if my transition to SkyDrive doesn't fix the problem!

 

[liberated]

I still say it may be a failing drive.


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[EverythingApple]

Thanks you both very much! After clearing 200GB+ from the boot drive earlier today, it's been working well. It remains to be seen whether I'm out of the woods for good. If things get rough again, I'll follow the steps you guys suggested to me.

How did you do that? In other words, what did you dump? That's a lot of space.

 

[Rafagon]

How did you do that? In other words, what did you dump? That's a lot of space.

Never dumped it, moved it to my trusty external 2 TB drive...


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[Rafagon]

I still say it may be a failing drive.


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And you know, you may be right. Apple in fact issued a recall for iMacs hard drives produced during a certain range of years, and mine falls in that range (2009). The recall was issued due to the fact certain Seagate hard drives used in those machines may fail. I fully qualify for a replacement hard drive at no charge. I just didn't wanna go through the hassle, although I believe it's still not too late to so it. They do not make themselves responsible for cloning my hard drive and moving all my stuff onto the new drive! I have no problem moving my documents to my external drive, but it seems like a huge and tedious undertaking to re-install my NUMEROUS applications. Things would be much easier if Apple made themselves responsible for cloning my drive and copying everything onto the replacement...

So if moving over to Skydrive as my cloud drive like I did today doesn't keep the problem under control, I may have to bite the bullet and take the iMac in for that hard drive replacement...


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