My Mac won’t start up b/c my disk is full!

Forgot to mention that the Mount option for the physical disk is frozen and not ‘clickable’

Thank you, HWTech! I was able to free up disk space on my Macintosh HD by deleting huge, obsolete database files and deleting contents of my /Library/Caches/directory. Using the command to check on free disk space, I have freed 33GB, so I’m at 89% capacity.

However, for some reason, I still can’t boot up in Safe Mode... I tried to be patient and let it boot throughout the night, but in the morning the progress bar was in the same place! Do I need to delete more in order to get startup working again?

If so, how do I access my photos via the Photosapp, in order to do so?

I thought I’d let my mac be shut down for a day after all the deleting, to give it time to fully delete everything... but even if my mac is shutdown for just a day, suddenly the free space fills up by ~1GB! Is this due to temporary files that it’s generating?

Thank you for your help so far... I know this problem will be solved and I’ll never need to do this again!

Thank you!!

Hi, I tried booting in verbose mode, but the info passed on screen so quickly,  that I could barely have time to read ... I didn’t see any errors, though... is there some key I can press to pause the screen? After the booting data ran, then the screen went immediately to the apple icon and an empty progress bar and eventually went black, but not to sleep, at which point I had to press the power button to start it up again.

I forgot to mention in my last reply that I had already tried first aid and it was completed successfully, but after running first aid I was only able to get to the apple icon and an empty progress bar while attempting booting up in safe mode (but before I ran first aid, I had more than 50% on the progress bar when trying to boot up in safe mode).

The exact model of my mac is: 

MacBook Pro (13 inch, Early 2011)

I haven’t tried removing any hardware from my computer yet.

I’ve been pretty good about saving backups to my external hard drive, but I can’t remember if the last one includes all my most recent documents. Is it possible to save another backup of all my files while my computer’s GUI is inaccessible, i.e. can it be done via the Terminal or by some other means?

Once I have a recent backup, I’ll try reinstalling macOS over top itself.

I really appreciate your suggestions and help!!

I used Terminal in OSRecovery mode to copy a few important files to a USB disk then used diskutil to eject.

Verbose mode showed one error:

“Tues Mar 31 13:06:03 2020 localhost com.apple.xpx.launchd[1] <Error>: Failed to remove file or directory name: com.apple.pkg.IncompatibleKextConfigDate.1442293.DKug59, error=1:Operation not permitted. Further logging suppressed.”

What exactly do you mean by “Erase the physical drive as GUID partition and MacOS Extended (Journaled).”?

Do you mean to erase the Macintosh HD volume? My mac shows:

Macintosh HD

318.85 GB Logical Volume Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted). To confirm, is this the volume I do a clean install on?

My screen looks different... I tried looking for View > Show all devices, in other options in the menu, thinking that the physical disk might be embedded somewhere else, but no success. Any ideas how to select the physical disk? Or should I simply choose the MacOS Extended (Journaled) volume and then when I select Erase, further options will appear? (I have copied all necessary files should this process cause me to lose all my user documents and files.)

Thank you so much, I started the process, but it won’t let me erase because it couldn’t unmount the disk. So I unmounted the Macintosh HD volume and then tried erasing, but it gave the same error. I’m following the instructions to erase as per HWTech’s previous post, but it doesn’t prompt me for my AppleID. Any suggestions? I attach a phone photo of my mac’s screen...

The Mount option for the physical disk became available in Internet Recovery Mode, but not in Recovery Mode.

Thank you so much for your suggestions and guidance! I am now replying to you from my working Mac. It works a lot faster now and an added bonus is that my trackpad now works again!!! I had been using a mouse since my trackpad was rendered ineffective back in 2018! Could it be that my trackpad stopped working back then because my startup disk was too full?

Anyway, thanks again! You guys are great, I really appreciate all your help! :)

Thank you again. Is there another way to view the physical drive? In Disk Utility I have no option to select View > Show all devices from the menu bar.