Mac OS X Maverick started upgraded and stuck partway due to not enough disk space

Question

I started upgrading my Mac to Maverick which Apple allowed (there was enough space) and then after it rebooted it said that I was missing 2GB of space. I'm able to get to the terminal but can't delete anything because every time I do it says the disk is in read-only mode.

I have no idea how to proceed, the upgrade said there was room and then once started ran out. I also can't clean up any files.

In case you're wondering this is a 32gb SSD drive so there is very limited space. I'm going to be hard pressed to make room as it is (very few data files).

In any case, how can I delete files from the terminal? I've tried the directions from the following link but I get the read-only error, and apparently I'm not the only one...

http://mintcloud.tumblr.com/post/65138101209/not-enough-free-space-how-to-survive-mavericks

Answer 1

To be clear, the OS upgrade was downloaded from the App Store, it completed, and after your computer rebooted the installer claimed there was insufficient space and threw you onto your desktop with no write permissions?

If you can tolerate another reboot, I would try seeing if you can bypass this by going into single-user mode. Hold the Command and S keys together as your computer restarts, and this should launch you into an interface where you can enter terminal commands to change file permissions and delete files.

If you go this route, though, it may be a good idea to first verify and repair your disk permissions as explained here.

When you finish clearing the necessary space, go and and type reboot. Hopefully the installer will take over and finish the job.

Answer 2

I had a similar issue, but I was able to use the terminal. Not sure if you were using the same terminal commands as me, but here's what I did, copy/pasted from another Stack Exchange thread I just responded to. As someone with no knowledge of using Terminal who found this on the web, here is what I just did:

I was installing El Capitan from Snow Leopard. After taking a few hours to start installing, it popped up and said the installation failed, and to click restart to try again. I clicked restart, and it restarted, then asked me what disk I wanted to install El Capitan on, and I picked "Macintosh HD" and it said not enough space – which surprised me, because I had checked before downloading El Capitan and starting the install that I definitely had enough space. I think the partial install had taken up a lot of space. I couldn't get back to my normal functioning Snow Leopard; every time I turned on the computer it would take me to the El Capitan install screen.

After getting no help from Apple Support, who told me I was going to need to erase my hard drive, I started googling and found this:

Turn off computer using the power button. Hold down ⌘ (Command)+R, click the power button, keep holding down ⌘+R until the Apple logo appears, let go. This starts recovery mode. On the very top of the screen, go to Utilities→Terminal.

The goal was to find big files I could delete.

Type in

cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/

to get to your main disk, if it's called "Macintosh HD". You have to put a back slash before any spaces in the name. Or you could type cd "/Volumes/Macintosh HD", quoting the space.

If you type

ls -1

it tells you a list of everything in the folder you are in.

To get to my documents, I could use

cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Users/firstnamelastname/Documents

I think that was the path, but you can navigate around by doing

cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/
ls -1

it shows you a list of folders then get to the subfolder by either

cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Subfolder/        (typing full path)

or

cd ./Subfolder/

(shortcut where the . is wherever you are now). To go up a folder use

cd ..

Then once you're in a subfolder with some files you're considering deleting, you can use

ls -lh

to get a list with file sizes, so you can identify the big ones. After I navigated around a while and couldn't find many big files, I googled and found I could do

find / -size +500000 -print

to get a list of paths of all files bigger than 500 MB.

Then I could re-navigate to them so that I could delete them.

To delete use

rm filetodelete.ext

(Be careful that you type the file name correctly; you don't want to accidentally delete other stuff; this can't be undone as far as I know.)

To check the directory you are currently in, use

pwd

I deleted some big video files I had and freed up several GB of space.

Check the space with

df -h

Look for "Macintosh HD" in the list (if that's the name of yours) and there should be some stats about % of space full, GB used vs. free, etc.

Then, in the very top left of the screen, the picture of an Apple, I clicked that and clicked "restart," my computer restarted, started the El Capitan install again, took forever, but actually finished! And now I am happily running El Capitan and did not need to erase my hard drive. I will be backing up some of my stuff now, lesson learned. :)