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