Start up disk full/won’t start up

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Level 1

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Start up disk full/won’t start up

Hi anyone who will read this,

Note; I am not very computer savvy!

my Mac desktop has been saying it’s full for a while now, I thought I had deleted enough things and left it alone. One night I turned it off and the next day I came back and it wouldn’t turn back on. Some basic research and going into recovery mode I’ve found my Mac is too full. I tried the start up disk first aid and restart, and nothing.

I tried to reinstall IOS, I don’t have enough space.

I don’t have a current time machine back up so I really want to delete enough random stuff to have the Mac start up normally. (So I can then do a back up/delete more files).

Ps, my fusion drive and container disk 3 are not mounted and won’t mount, but the Macintosh HD volumes are.

iMac Pro

Posted on Dec 23, 2020 1:00 AM

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Answer 1

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SeaPapp

Level 7

26,486 points

Dec 23, 2020 3:28 AM in response to CroftyY

Start up in safe mode and clear some space How to use safe mode on your Mac - Apple Support

A good rule of thumb is to always have 15% or better free space for your iMac to operate properly. Move some of your large libraries like music, photos and videos off to external storage.

Start backing up before you have a catastrophe and lose everything.

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Answer 2

HWTech

Level 9

55,790 points

Dec 23, 2020 5:52 PM in response to CroftyY

If you are using the APFS file system, then even if you delete data from the drive it may not actually free up any space until all the backups have been completed since the "deleted" data is still contained within the APFS snapshots. You can try thinning or deleting the APFS snapshots if @Mike Sombrio's suggestions don't work. I'm not sure if Recovery Mode allows access to the command line utility to manage APFS snapshots or not.

https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2018/04/07/reclaiming-drive-space-by-thinning-apple-file-system-snapshot-backups/

macOS really wants to have at least 20GB of free storage space available for normal operations. I know that macOS 10.12 nags me about it if I drop even a tiny bit below 20GB of free space.

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Start up disk full/won’t start up

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