Too Full to Empty

Recently I needed to help someone with a MacBook Pro that would not start up. The computer shut down unexpectedly and displayed the “Your computer restarted because of a problem. Press a key or wait a few seconds to continue starting up.” message.  We let the computer wait a few seconds, and the message kept coming back. After six automatic restart attempts, the computer displayed the missing startup disk icon.

The disk drive on the computer was rather full. The user was trying to empty the trash when the computer crashed. The computer was able to boot into the macOS Recovery system. At first, I tried using Disk Utility to check for and repair disk errors. This did not solve the issue. Using the terminal, I tried to delete some files to make more space, but I got the message, “No space left on device.” I stumbled upon a post on Stack Exchange that solved the issue. Essentially, the process was to delete the virtual memory volume to make room to delete other large files on the computer from the terminal. Thanks to Eduardo Pinheiro for the solution and John Noble for posting the question.

What computer issues have you solved lately? I would love to hear about them in the comments below.


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