Question :
My son alarmed me today that his ‘good old’ Mac gives a “your startup disk is full” warning at startup. He has our old Intel CoreDuo MacBook that can only run MacOSX 10.6.8 Snow Leopard.
What is the easiest way to free up the much needed harddrive space ?
Answer :
There are various programs that can do the job of identifying which files are cluttering your harddrive and deleting unneeded files.
If you have an older Mac that can not run the latest version of OSX, I would suggest using the DiskWave application to do so, because of 4 reasons :
- DiskWave is very small in size (only about 1MB), so you can even install and run it on an extremely full harddrive
- DiskWave is able to manage external drives, so you can also run it on a newer/faster/other Mac and connect the problematic Mac as an external drive [ in so called “Target Mode” by restarting the problematic Mac with the T-key pressed and connecting it to the other Mac with a FireWire-cable ]
- DiskWave is available for various old versions of MacOSX
- DiskWave is FREE to download and use
Using DiskWave is rather straight forward. A quick instruction video can be seen here :
Getting hold of DiskWave might be problematic however, as the developer’s website (Aymeric Barthe) seems to be down :
And the DiskWave app is NOT available from the Mac AppStore either… [ beware not too be fooled into thinking it’s the same as the iDiskWave app ! ]
A secondary problem is that the best available version (DiskWave 0.4) does not support any pre-Core2Duo. For now, all (older) versions of DiskWave can be downloaded here :
download any DiskWave version at Mac.FileHorse.com
Note that DiskWave 0.3.2 is the latest version of DiskWave to run on PowerPC (G3/G4/G5) Macs and 1st generation Intel (CoreSolo and CoreDuo) Macs.
And if those links stop working also, you can download DiskWave 0.3.2 here :
[ !! after downloading, replace the .doc file-extension by .dmg to get the installer !! ]
Enjoy !
MacManus.nl 