FunnyMama

Q: How to delete extraneous files on full hard drive through a back door?

My sister's MacBook Pro (2010) will not start up in normal mode -- hangs with apple and progress bar.  I know the 500 Gb drive is too full. Is there a way to delete extraneous files through Disk Utility or other back-end measure? I've tried all afternoon to Restore the hard drive and/or startup drive to an external backup drive with no success (errors 254 and 252).

 

After Repair of Macintosh HD, this pops up:  Disk Utility can't repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed up files. 

 

OK...  Here's what I've been trying:

   Click on Macintosh HD and only have access to First Aid / Partition -- can't get to First Aid / Erase/ Restore

   Click on the light type "Macintosh HD" and when I try to restore it to my external drive, this comes up:   Restore Failure:  Revovery partition restores can only be done on GPT partition maps.

   Click on OS X Base System to Restore, this comes up:  The startup disk can't be used as a restore source.  To use this disk as a source, restart your computer using the recovery system and open DU again.  Tried that, get same message.

I tried creating 'new image' of the drive and Restore that version and get:  Restore Failure, could not validate source - error 254.

 

Are there commands in Terminal that can check the disk, list files by type... and can I delete or erase them?

I did some of this on PCs (back in the day of WordPerfect...) but haven't had to deal with this on macs.

 

I'm typing this on my MB Air. Sister's MB Pro has the issue. Thanks!

OS X Mavericks (10.9.5), MacBook Pro

Posted on Jun 19, 2016 10:02 AM

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Q: How to delete extraneous files on full hard drive through a back door?

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  • by leroydouglas,

    leroydouglas leroydouglas Jun 19, 2016 10:40 AM in response to FunnyMama
    Level 7 (22,894 points)
    Notebooks
    Jun 19, 2016 10:40 AM in response to FunnyMama
  • by Grant Bennet-Alder,

    Grant Bennet-Alder Grant Bennet-Alder Jun 19, 2016 10:43 AM in response to FunnyMama
    Level 9 (60,714 points)
    Desktops
    Jun 19, 2016 10:43 AM in response to FunnyMama

    Once you know what you want to remove, Single-User mode gives you just a Terminal shell and no MacOS features, but is small enough to boot up alone.

     

    Target Disk Mode may be your best bet, it requires almost nothing from the Target Mac, and code is all in ROM.

  • by FunnyMama,

    FunnyMama FunnyMama Jun 19, 2016 12:34 PM in response to leroydouglas
    Level 1 (8 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jun 19, 2016 12:34 PM in response to leroydouglas

    Thank you for replying so quickly. Unfortunately, the machine stops (screen goes black) when the progress bar is 1/2 way across when starting up in Safe Mode.

    As for Target Disk Mode, my macbook air doesn't have firewire or thunderbolt capabilities.  It does have Airdrop but I can't get the pro to start up and get to that point.

     

    Are there any other ways to Safe Mode than described in the support page you referenced?

  • by FunnyMama,

    FunnyMama FunnyMama Jun 19, 2016 12:37 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder
    Level 1 (8 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jun 19, 2016 12:37 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

    This is a great idea!  Is there an instruction in Terminal Mode to list all files by extension? Then can I delete or erase named files?

    At this point, I can't get in to see what files are on the hard drive.

    Thank you!

  • by Grant Bennet-Alder,

    Grant Bennet-Alder Grant Bennet-Alder Jun 19, 2016 1:07 PM in response to FunnyMama
    Level 9 (60,714 points)
    Desktops
    Jun 19, 2016 1:07 PM in response to FunnyMama

    Terminal can be kind of creepy -- it can feel like you are flying blind. It resembles MS-DOS, because that is where they stole MS-DOS from.

     

    Convention used below is metadata is inside <angle-brackets>.

    Substitute in actual names instead of the items in <angle-brackets>.

     

    You will end up in the directory/folder:

    /Users/<User-id>

    to see what files are right there, type:

    ls -al

    to change directory type:

    cd <directory>

    if you find something big to remove:

    rm <filename.ext>

    $ ls -al

    total 80

    drwxr-xr-x+  21 davey  staff    714 Oct  5  2015 .

    drwxr-xr-x    6 root   admin    204 Dec 31 10:55 ..

    -r--------    1 davey  staff      7 Jul 28  2015 .CFUserTextEncoding

    -rw-r--r--@   1 davey  staff  21508 Oct  5  2015 .DS_Store

    drwx------    4 davey  staff    136 Oct  5  2015 .FileSync

    drwx------   12 davey  staff    408 Oct  6  2015 .Trash

    -r--------    1 davey  admin   7916 Oct  5  2015 .account

    -rw-r--r--    1 davey  staff     92 Jun  5  2014 .bash_history

    drwxr-xr-x    3 davey  staff    102 Jun  5  2014 .cups

    drwxr-xr-x    3 davey  staff    102 Jun  5  2014 .jagex_cache_32

    drwxr-xr-x    2 davey  staff     68 Jun  5  2014 .ssh

    drwxr-xr-x    2 davey  staff     68 Jun  5  2014 .wapi

    drwxr-xr-x   44 davey  staff   1496 Oct  6  2015 Desktop

    drwxr-xr-x   67 davey  staff   2278 Oct  5  2015 Documents

    drwxr-xr-x  592 davey  staff  20128 Oct  6  2015 Downloads

    drwxr-xr-x@  67 davey  staff   2278 Oct  6  2015 Library

    drwxr-xr-x   10 davey  staff    340 Oct  5  2015 Movies

    drwxr-xr-x    6 davey  staff    204 Oct  5  2015 Music

    drwxr-xr-x   25 davey  staff    850 Oct  5  2015 Pictures

    drwxr-xr-x   15 davey  staff    510 Oct  5  2015 Public

    drwxr-xr-x    7 davey  staff    238 Oct  5  2015 Sites

    GrantsMacPro:davey grant$

    In this example, the biggest things are in Downloads, so I might change directory to there:

    cd downloads

    ls -al

    to remove every files in that folder:

    rm *.*

     

    you are trying to get in the neighbor hood of 9GB free to be able to boot up Mac OS.