Mac Mini hard drive full and will not boot up

[Dashman]

Hi all,

We have a mac mini running tiger in our studio that we use as a web development server.

The hard drive is 100% full, and I was unable to delete anything or back anything up to DVD to clear up some space. I presume this is because there was no room left for temporary files and such like.

Anyways, I have tried to reboot it and it just gets stuck on the purple screen - the screen that usually appears before the grey screen with the Apple logo.

I have tried holding down the option key during startup and get taken to the screen where you would usually select a drive to boot from, however, no drives show up. I only get the arrow button and the little clock that appears. After a while, that screen also freezes. I am also unable to boot up in single user mode.

Could somebody please advise.

Many thanks,

D

 

[nirvana]

Does it recognize the system discs that came with your system? Try whacking them in and pressing Alt, boot from the disc and go to disk utility you could try to erase free space this might free up some space.

 

[Dashman]

Hi there ...

Thanks for the reply. Well, I booted up from the install disks, and it then gave me an error (similar to "kernal panic" errors) and asked me to reboot. That happened twice, then I rebooted without holding any keys down and it booted up ok.... wierd!

 

[rman]

Can you boot into single user mode? I believe if you reboot and press either an s or a control s. It should get you into single user mode. You maybe able to do some house keeping there, if you know some basic Unix commands.