I can't run boinc on one of my systems. I get the following error in the log:

"3/30/2007 7:11:33 AM|SETI@home|Message from server: No disk space (YOU must free 36672.6 MB before BOINC gets space). Review preferences for minimum disk free space allowed."

My computer only has a 30GB hard drive! How can I get 36GB free??? I get this with my other clients too, not just seti. Is there a way to change the settings? I can't find any options to decrease this amount of disk space required.

You can change your disk usage settings to more normal numbers through Your Account, View/Edit General preferences.

Please post here what these settings say:
Disk and memory usage
Use at most X GB disk space
Leave at least Y GB disk space free
Use at most Z% of total disk space

The default setting is X=100GB, Y=0.1GB, Z=50% if I am not mistaken.
Change these settings to closer to home numbers, so in your case X=30, Y=0.1 and Z depends on how much free space you have free on the hard drive. If you are already using 16GB of the drive and you set this to 50%, you will get new error messages.

Start with that. After you save these changes to the website, open BOINC Manager, (Advanced View,) Projects tab, select Seti@Home, press Update. Switch to the Messages tab and check the next set of messages.

Which projects are you attached to?
What is your "connect to server" rate set to?
Which BOINC version?

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My computer only has a 30GB hard drive! How can I get 36GB free???

Now that's an interesting thing that should be fixed on the client... It shouldn't ask you to free more than you have!

In fact, I think it's not a good idea to ask to free space. It should say "review preferences for disk usage, or consider detaching projects that use too much disk". And MAYBE also say something about freeing disk space; but that should be the last option.

In most cases, people who get that message just modify their preferences and let it run. Most people don't even know the preferences are there, or don't read them carefully; and they would have no problem with BOINC using more disk than the preferences currently say.