Disk Full - Crashed - Won't Boot

[pygolpher]

I've got an iMac that has been a champ. I saw it crash this morning as it sits next to me. After getting into the repair section of Recovery I found that the drive is just about full. I can take care of that, I have things that I can easily delete no problem and free up a good amount of space. However the device no longer boots. I tried to boot into safe mode, but I get about 50% through the scroll bar and it hangs. Both safe mode and not safe mode. I tried to use the terminal in recovery mode, but that does not seem to have full access to the entire drive, which somewhat makes sense.

Any recommendations on how I may be able to recover?

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

Boot from an external USB and rescue your valuable data first?

 

[Fishrrman]

How I'd fix it:

Get an external USB drive.

Boot to INTERNET recovery (NOT to "the recovery partition").
Command-OPTION-R at boot.

Install a fresh copy of the OS on the EXTERNAL drive.

Get it set up with a username and password and get to the finder.

Now you're booted up "externally", bypassing the internal drive.
You can start deleting all the unnecessary junk on the internal drive.
I'd start with movies -- they usually take up a lot of space.

You probably need to delete 30-40gb of stuff.
Then empty the trash.

See if the internal drive will boot then.

 

[pygolpher]

That did it. Appreciate it. I've never gotten to the point that I needed to boot from an alternative drive, but thought we could do it.

 

[Fishrrman]

"That did it. Appreciate it. I've never gotten to the point that I needed to boot from an alternative drive, but thought we could do it."

The smart Mac user always, always, ALWAYS keeps a second, external bootable drive somewhere close by for emergencies such as the one you had.

Good to see that you got it fixed.