A Tale of Woe and Recovery

[Charles Martin]

> From: Ken McNamara <conmara at grandcanyonhiker.com>
>
> Charles -
>
> What you're saying is that OSX clobbered OS9.2?
>
No, my 9.2.2 on that machine worked fine and was never affected.

> Is it really a fact that OSX won't run with 186MB of drive space?

Mac OS X needs at a dead minimum more than 80MB of free drive space 
because of it's Virtual Memory setup. It uses 80MB "swapfiles" and 
keeps at least one handy no matter HOW much RAM you've got. It creates 
more as needed (so people with less memory need more free HD space, you 
see?).

Obviously OS X *will* run with only 186MB free -- my machine booted 
every time I asked it to. What it could not do was save anything. This 
could be more due to the totally hosed Finder and system prefs than the 
amount of drive space available, I don't know. But certainly anyone 
running OS X on a drive with less than 200MB free is just asking for 
trouble. My rule of thumb for years has been that if you're down to 
less than 10% of your HD space free, you should be shopping for a new 
drive. If you're below 5%, you should be making backups IMMEDIATELY and 
ordering a new (larger or additional) drive.

_Chas_

"Executives in the PC business use the word "sexy", in such a way that 
I'm always surprised to discover that their children aren't adopted. 
The Mac interface is not "sexy", and it would be grotesque to want it 
to be. It is, in fact, playful, often well over the line into 
frivolity. The bouncing icons (and the puffs of smoke and the 
pipe-organ speech synthesizer and the way dialogs tidily resize and the 
drop-shadows on the windows and the jellybean buttons and the eject key 
on the keyboard) are not individually rationalizable on utilitarian 
grounds, and they do not pretend they mean to be. They are there to, in 
aggregate, change the nature of your relationship with the device. They 
are joyful, and they hope their joy is infectious." -- Glenn McDonald