Cannot reinstall MacOS as not enough disc space error advice

[Pagi1984]

Hi, my mac is freezing on startup past password screen and while loading apps and programs. I have spoken to Mac support who said get an external HDD and put the OS on that, but before I try that as money is tight and I would have to buy a new SSD. Can I instead try 1 of these two things to reinstall OS.

When I go into MacOS utilities and choose reinstall OS option and try to install the OS on my Mac internal HD it says not enough free space to install it, need like 2.5gb more. OK.

1. Sometimes my Mac loads up normally past password screen and is usable for like a minute. So, is it then possible to go into safe mode and then delete some thing from my mac HD to create the 2.5gb free space needed to reinstall the OS in mac utilities?

or

2. I have boot camp installed on my internal HD too with like 15gb free space on it. can I delete boot camp and then do something to allocate the free space to the mac hd so it then has the extra 2.5gb space it needs? Or somehow reallocate the 15gb free 15gb boot camp has to my mac hd instead? Ideally is it possible to do these in macOS utilities as like I said can't really use mac past password screen.

 

[Rod]

It sounds like you have a full internal drive. This poses problems doing anything let alone a complex task like removing a partition used for windows.
I would suggest that you look at moving say your Photos library to an external hard drive. I'm guessing you will have 5Gb or more of photos but you can always check that.
Alternatively you may have a few movies stored. A HD movie could be as big as 4Gb on its own.
Without exception media takes up most of the storage on our devices. This includes big games as well.
Once you have say 10% of your storage free you can think about other things like re installing your OS which may not actually be necessary.
If you need any instruction on how to move your Photos library or anything else please ask.
Sent from my iPad using Mac-Forums

 

[Raz0rEdge]

What Mac? How much storage did it come with? How much is free? If you are scraping to get 2.5GB free, as Rod said you are already in a pretty bad state and should be doing MORE drastic things. You should first get an external storage device and offload as much as your data as possible off your internal drive. That should make macOS behave. Going forward you need to keep your internal drive (wherever macOS is installed) at about 25% of free space.

 

[Pagi1984]

What Mac? How much storage did it come with? How much is free? If you are scraping to get 2.5GB free, as Rod said you are already in a pretty bad state and should be doing MORE drastic things. You should first get an external storage device and offload as much as your data as possible off your internal drive. That should make macOS behave. Going forward you need to keep your internal drive (wherever macOS is installed) at about 25% of free space.

Comes with like 150gb storage, it's a Macbook Air 2013 edition I believe. 15gb free on Mac HD and same amount free on boot camp.
I will get external drive but before that can I somehow remove photos, video etc via safe mode or some other way that doesn't require regular mac OS past the password screen?

- - - Updated - - -

If you need any instruction on how to move your Photos library or anything else please ask.
Sent from my iPad using Mac-Forums

I would like to remove photos, games, videos in safe mode or some other way not using regular mac OS past the password screen as my Mac crashes at this point. Is this possible and if so how please?

 

[Rod]

Okay, so it's about 6 years old which is a little over the expected life span for what is probably a HDD ( a mechanical spinning Disk).
So this is the primary reason for a backup, the eventual, inevitable death /corruption of a HDD.
Do you have a backup?
If not can you startup into the Recovery Partition? Try booting while holding the R button or Command an R, it's different for different OS's.
If so select Disk Utility and run Disk First Aid on your Macintosh HD.


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[Raz0rEdge]

What version of macOS is on that thing? If it's recent enough, you can do this from the Recovery Console. Once the machine is powered down, hold down CMD+r when you start the machine. It will end up in recovery console. Now open Utilities->Terminal to get the terminal prompt. From there:

cd /Volumes
cd "Macintosh HD"
ls -l

This will put you into your drive and list the folders. You will see folders like Applications, Library, Network, System, Users and so on. If you don't see those, then you need to first mount the drive.

If you do see the right folders, you can then do

cd Users/<username>
ls -l

Obviously, replace <username> with your actual username and you should now see folders like Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures and so on. You can now go into each of those folders with the cd command and remove files/folders using the rm command.

Not comfortable with the command line? Tell us where you have stored your files and we can tell you how to remove them.

 

[Pagi1984]

Okay, so it's about 6 years old which is a little over the expected life span for what is probably a HDD ( a mechanical spinning Disk).
So this is the primary reason for a backup, the eventual, inevitable death /corruption of a HDD.
Do you have a backup?
If not can you startup into the Recovery Partition? Try booting while holding the R button or Command an R, it's different for different OS's.
If so select Disk Utility and run Disk First Aid on your Macintosh HD.


Sent from my iPhone using Mac-Forums

I have done this and disc comes back fine as far as I can tell. I also now have an external HD. Although now when I choose reinstall OS via recovery like you said. It says my HD isn't in the required GUID partition table or whatever it's called. I read up and I can change the HD to GUID but it will wipe out the whole HD and I can't do that as part of the HD has stuff I need to keep. I also created a 100gb partition on the external HD just for Mac OS.

- - - Updated - - -

What version of macOS is on that thing? If it's recent enough, you can do this from the Recovery Console. Once the machine is powered down, hold down CMD+r when you start the machine. It will end up in recovery console. Now open Utilities->Terminal to get the terminal prompt. From there:

cd /Volumes
cd "Macintosh HD"
ls -l

This will put you into your drive and list the folders. You will see folders like Applications, Library, Network, System, Users and so on. If you don't see those, then you need to first mount the drive.

If you do see the right folders, you can then do

cd Users/<username>
ls -l

Obviously, replace <username> with your actual username and you should now see folders like Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures and so on. You can now go into each of those folders with the cd command and remove files/folders using the rm command.

Not comfortable with the command line? Tell us where you have stored your files and we can tell you how to remove them.

That sounds perfect, thank you. I will try this!