All sorts of problems...

[tape op]

Here's Part 1 of my situation:

My main harddrive crashed. I can start it up and log in to user account, but finder won't start once I log in. It only displays the background, and then the spinning beachball for eternity. My hunch is that it has something to do with harddrive space. I accidentally transferred too much data off of an external drive, to the point where I think there's less than 1MB of free memory.

Part 2 of the situation is this:

Acing on the aforementioned hunch, I'm attempting to mount my crashed drive as the slave to drive from another computer, so I can delete some of the extraneous data. Trouble is, the system won't boot when both drives are connected. I reset the jumpers, so it should be no problem. Is there a conflict since both drives have an OS installed? Or is the problem most likely something else?

 

[Ric]

Hi there and welcome,

can you start in Single User Mode...

If you can then we can delete some files from there, and then get the Mac to boot up !

Single User mode will dump you into a CLI (command line prompt) if you are not sure what to do once there let us know...

regards

Ric

 

[tape op]

I tried starting in single user mose, and I ran the file check utility from there, but I don't know how to delete particular files.

Interestingly, I was unable to safe boot.

 

[Ric]

Hi there,

Safe boot wouldn't work, you haven't the space...

Once you get dumped into the Terminal...

You can remove files with the rm command...

Do you know where the extra data is ?

If you know say, where there is one big folder you can delete it...

rm -r /Users/Yourusername/Desktop/testFolder/

This would delete a folder on the desktop called testFolder

regards

Ric

 

[tape op]

Unfortunately I'd have to browse the data. Is there a command that will list directory contents? Also, if I need to delete a file rather than a folder, would I just type

rm -r /Users/Yourusername/Desktop/testFolder/file.ext


Thanks for your help, by the way. I appreciate it tremendously.


-J

 

[Ric]

No problem..

To delete an individual file...

rm /Users/Yourusername/Desktop/testFolder/file.ext

regards

Ric

 

[Ric]

Have a watch of this it may help...

regards

Ric

 

[tape op]

How do you switch and browse folders?


-J

 

[Ric]

The root of your hard drive is

/

so type

cd /

to go to the top level of your drive...


then you can use

ls

to display the contents...

ls -la

will show invisibles and more info...

pwd

will tell you 'where' you are ie what folder you are in...

There's a bit two much to list here...

Have a read of this, it is targeted more for OS X Server, but it should give you a quick understanding of a few commands...

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/MacOSXSrvr10.3_CommandLineAdminGuide.pdf

regards

Ric