Macbook air start up disc full

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Help
when I logged in today, got message "start up disc full". I clicked okay and then received a full white page. no menu bar, no icons at bottom. fully white with no place to go.

Help please
 

chscag

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The remedy is to remove things that you don't need from your MBA and put them on an external drive. Since the built in flash drive on the MBA is very expensive and difficult to upgrade, you need to keep close track of its remaining space.

Which model MacBook Air do you have? (Year and model) Also tell us what version of OS X you're running?
 
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Macbook air - start up full

Hi thank you for responding. My Macbook air is about 6 mod old. it was a standard model with no unusual upgrades. the software is the latest version of lion. I just installed latest upgrade about a week ago. I removed a large number of photos over this past weekend and did a special delete of those items from IPhoto.

My screen is fully white so I have NO access to anything

thanks for your help
 
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cMBP 13" mid-2012, 2.9 ghz i7, 8gb ram, 256 gb SSD,
Being a newbie to Mac computers... I'm not sure if anything can be done other than to format/reinstall OS X. Do you have a backup of your computer on an external drive? Do you have a flash drive or self-made DVD of Lion you can use to reinstall using a USB/Firewire DVD drive? Hopefully you do have a backup of your files so that it will be relatively easy to put the important ones back on your computer once you reinstall.


I am not familiar with any other way of fixing the hard drive space issue.


Here is the link to the recovery page on apple.com: Apple - OS X Recovery restores your Mac with a few clicks.

I hope someone more knowlegable comes around and is able to help you further. Good luck!! I hope you get this fixed without much data loss.
 

chscag

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Try this procedure:

Reboot your MacBook Air but this time hold down the Command and R keys at the same time. That should boot the machine to the "Recovery Partition". Why don't you try that and get back to us and we can go from there to see what can be done to get you back up again.
 
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hi
Having restarted with control R -
i now see a screen with OX Utilities. Options are restore from Time Machine (I use online carbonate), reinstall OSX (I downloaded lion version) Get help online and Disk Utility

Now what?
 
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Because I have everything backed up on Carbonite, I just decided to go ahead and reload OX Lion.
My question next is HOW CAN I KEEP THIS FROM HAPPENING IN THE FUTURE??? I do not keep much on this hard drive.

thank you very much
 
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Macbook air -- still in trouble

Well I wanted to go ahead and reinstall OX lion 10.8.
Forget that. I am told I need an additional 4.57 GB in order to reinstall OX lion.

Now what?
 

chscag

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You need to first erase your drive using Disk Utility while in Recovery. That will free up the space so that you can reinstall. Otherwise you will not have enough room.
 

pigoo3

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My question next is HOW CAN I KEEP THIS FROM HAPPENING IN THE FUTURE??? I do not keep much on this hard drive.

You didn't tell us what size storage device you have...but obviously...the smaller the capacity of the storage device...the less that can be stored on it.

To avoid a full hard drive situation...you need to carefully monitor how full it is (amount of free space remaining). When free space gets low...you either need to delete some items...or back them up on another device (then delete them to free up space).

Well I wanted to go ahead and reinstall OX lion 10.8.
Forget that. I am told I need an additional 4.57 GB in order to reinstall OX lion.

Now what?

See my post above...you need to remove/delete some items from yout MBA's internal storage device.

- Nick
 
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option to erase

Hi
I am in my utilities folder but see no option to erase. what command can I use to delete or erase?

thank you for your help
 
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okay, I found it. I believe I am on a path to recovery. That said, how can I prevent this in the future. I don't keep much on this machine
thank you
 

chscag

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Use the option to format the drive as that will effectively erase it. Format it using the Mac OS Extended Journaled file system. The GUID partition scheme should be checked off by default, but make sure it is anyway. Let us know how you're getting on.
 

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okay, I found it. I believe I am on a path to recovery. That said, how can I prevent this in the future. I don't keep much on this machine
thank you

You mentioned this above...and I replied.:)

Even though you said that you don't keep much on this hard drive...you must keep enough on there AND be downloading enough new stuff...that your hard drive is filling up (otherwise it wouldn't be happening).;)

You have to carefully monitor how full your hard drive is getting (track how much free space you have)...and delete things as necessary.

Please tell us what size hard drive you have. The smaller it is...the easier it is to fill up.

- Nick
 
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hard drive space

Thank you for your note. I do not download anything from the web. I do keep photos on the machine for one week, then I move them to "dropbox". when I move them, I remove them from my machine. Could "dropbox" take up space on my hard drive, even though it is in the cloud?

The other thing is Gmail which I access through Mail. because Gmail is basically web based, it that taking up hard drive space??

Other than that, I have "clean my mac", and office for MAC.

that's it.
Thanks
 

chscag

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okay, I found it. I believe I am on a path to recovery. That said, how can I prevent this in the future. I don't keep much on this machine. thank you

OK, great. Let us know when you get everything back up and running. Preventing it in the future is easy... keep track of the amount of space remaining on your flash drive. As I mentioned in a previous post, upgrading that drive is expensive but it can be done. External hard drives are inexpensive and easy to use.
 

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Thank you for your note. I do not download anything from the web. I do keep photos on the machine for one week, then I move them to "dropbox".

You still haven't told us what size hard drive you have. It would be nice for us to know...just so we can better understand what sort of limitations you are dealing with.:)

- Nick
 
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I do not know the size of the hard drive and won't be able to respond until I have my system back up and running.
 

pigoo3

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I do not know the size of the hard drive and won't be able to respond until I have my system back up and running.

I see ok. I thought maybe your computer was running enough to check things out.

When things are working...to determine the size of your hard drive (and amount of free space):

- Go to your computers desktop
- locate your hard drive icon on the desktop
- do a "right click" on the hard drive icon

This will bring up an "info" window. In the window look for:

- "Capacity" (this is the total capacity/size of your hard drive)
- "Available" (this is the amount of free space remaining)

* Nick
 

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