Target disk mode -big sur

Ok from here, type ‘cd .. ‘ again and then ls -la again and post it here.

It should go into the parent directory from the directory you are in now, maybe i recognize that one (because i dont remember this one)

See if this article helps: https://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/fix-macos-installation-3624050/

I had this exact same problem. I had to reinstall Catalina.

2017 iMac 27"

Check out page 3 of this thread - there you can find my step-by-step process.

You cannot believe how happy I am that I found your comment. I’m in the EXACT same situation and I was losing it. Before installing the update the macbook gave me a message like: disk almost full. But no warning or anything and I could just continue. Now I am on that endless login > 29 minutes > target disk mode loop. Crazy that apple just lets you continue with the update although there wont be enough space. I’m gonna try out hooking another pc from my neighbour to my macbook to see if I can acces it and delete some stuff. Hopefully it works, otherwise i’ll have to resort to the terminal solution in which case I will post here again. If it does work I’ll also let you and others know btw.

Still think this is nuts, never a single problem with apple and now the macbook is just totally locked because of its own OS. To be continued

Yeah I feel your pain. I was beyond frustrated. Never had an issue like this before either. I have always pushed the limits a bit on storage available before updates but was able to count on the update making sure it had the necessary space available before starting. Not this time. I will surely double check I have extra space than the update says it needs in the future.

Good luck with hooking it up. Hope that works for you! If not, I posted a few of the Recovery Mode steps in another response - this is where you'll access Terminal if needed.

Update: i actually managed to figure out how terminal works and was able to delete alot of junk of my macbook. Now I have 65 gigs of free space instead of 12. Rebooting now to see if the big sur update is succesful

Thanks for posting the guide, its probably gonna help some other people! I figured it out indeed and the update was installed succesfully. I want to go back to Catalina though, I hate the update lol. I already accepted I threw away a whole weekend on this

How exactly did were you able to see everything with your commands? I'm literally trying to follow the steps..with the instructions you gave and it keeps saying "no such file or dictionary"....any advice? your situation is exactly mines...keeps restarting at 29 min screen and goes to target disk and it's annoying because i have 1 TB of data

hi thank you so much for your detailed response...i want to have hope as i have never used terminal either but when i follow the steps, i still get stuck? i cant get to my volumes as easily as you or the other users and it's so difficult to figure out where to go, i got a lil further away by following your instrux but i wasn't able to see recognizable folders i could delete from...sigh...did you use a specific web page to guide you?

No, i just looked up commands and only used the ls -la and cd + folder name.

when you start your computer with cmd + R and you follow the steps to get to the terminal, what do you see first when you open terminal and type ls -la ? Maybe we can work from there

ok so, this is what i see after i type in ls -la:

total 40

drwxr-x--- 3 root wheel 264 Feb 7 0:4:30 .

drwxr-xr-x 27 root wheel 2200 Feb 7 0:4:20 ..

-rw---------- 1 root wheel 1967 Feb 7 19:59 .bash_history

-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 10 Jan 11:27 .forward

drwx----- 12 root wheel 968 Feb 7 04:27 Library

did you get these at all??

Yea thats exactly what I got! From here it's easy. As I said before, what you see is a list of folders, or files and you have to go into the one with the ONE DOT at the end. As you can see there are 5 lines that appeared after you typed ls -la. Let's take the first line, it says: drwxr-x--- 3 root wheel 264 Feb 7 0:4:30 .

The folder (or file) is shown as the very LAST thing on the line, so the DOT. The dot itself is a name for a folder so to speak. The folder in the next line is called .. (so 2 dots) The folder in the 3rd line is called .bash_history, the folder in the next line is .forward and the next line is library.

You have to go into the dot. You do this by typing cd . ( so cd + space + . )

cd = change directory which means you go INTO what you type after it (the dot, which is a folder so to speak, that is gonna lead you to your files eventually).

So go into the dot, and then type ls -la again and post here what you get. As you know, ls -la tells you where you are and if you did it correctly, it should show you some lines again, like you posted, but different because now you are in a different place of the pc. I hope you get it, i'm a newbie myself who managed to pull this off.

By repeating the cd command and the ls -la command you can check out folders, go into them, check them again etc. and that way I found a path to my user account and my files. But you are at the beginning, so you first have to go into the DOT