Deleting things on a macbook drive

[Olly5041]

I have had to take the hard drive out of my macbook to delete a couple of file sinse it is not booting because their is no storage left. When i went onto my other imac it said i could delete anything on it. is their anyway i can delete things on it. I have tried using a PC but that wouldnt even open the hard drive.

 

[SweetPete]

Firstly, you need to make yourself clear. You have things on your macbook hard drive that you want to backup because it is not booting any more. Is that correct? If that is correct, and you have already taken the hard drive out of the mac, you could use a simple cheap SATA adapter to connect the hard drive to your imac. Then you can backup the things on it. After that, you will be able to put the hard drive back into your macbook and reinstall MAC OS X.

Of course, there are far easier ways to do the whole process than taking the hard drive out. Let me know exactly what you need to do and ill help you out as much as I can.

Basic guide on reinstalling MAC OS X (After you have backed up) attached.

The SATA adapter: http://goo.gl/wrK7r5

 

[Olly5041]

Firstly, you need to make yourself clear. You have things on your macbook hard drive that you want to backup because it is not booting any more. Is that correct? If that is correct, and you have already taken the hard drive out of the mac, you could use a simple cheap SATA adapter to connect the hard drive to your imac. Then you can backup the things on it. After that, you will be able to put the hard drive back into your macbook and reinstall MAC OS X.

Of course, there are far easier ways to do the whole process than taking the hard drive out. Let me know exactly what you need to do and ill help you out as much as I can.

Basic guide on reinstalling MAC OS X (After you have backed up) attached.

The SATA adapter: http://goo.gl/wrK7r5

so I have got an adaptor the problem is that it is not booting because the whole hard drive is completly full and insted of formatting the hard drive i would just like to delete something on it that is using 50gb of storage. But when i plug the hard drive into my computer (imac) and go to delete something it says that i cannot delete it. is their any way i can delete something on it.

 

[SweetPete]

Ok well your best bet is to either plug that hard drive into a working mac and move stuff off of the drive onto your macs hard drive, or you can put the hard drive back into the mac it came from, hold cmd+R, then reinstall os x, you won't have to lose your files. In the cmd+r state you can also just run disk utility which will enable you to check your drive for errors, or completely format it (after you have backed up your stuff of course).

If for any reason none of that works, I would personally run the disk utility from the cmd+r mode, create a new partition on the hard drive (even if it's tiny for now it can be changed later), install a fresh copy of mac osx on that partition and then it will boot.


Also, back to square one, do you know why it's not booting? A full hard drive wouldn't stop a mac from booting, it would impair the performance, but not stop it from booting.

 

[Olly5041]

Ok well your best bet is to either plug that hard drive into a working mac and move stuff off of the drive onto your macs hard drive, or you can put the hard drive back into the mac it came from, hold cmd+R, then reinstall os x, you won't have to lose your files. In the cmd+r state you can also just run disk utility which will enable you to check your drive for errors, or completely format it (after you have backed up your stuff of course).

If for any reason none of that works, I would personally run the disk utility from the cmd+r mode, create a new partition on the hard drive (even if it's tiny for now it can be changed later), install a fresh copy of mac osx on that partition and then it will boot.


Also, back to square one, do you know why it's not booting? A full hard drive wouldn't stop a mac from booting, it would impair the performance, but not stop it from booting.

yeah... i have tryed this and nothing happens. I think it was because as i was installing the new os x the computer must have ran out of storage to use and then any time i tried to use the disk utility it wouldnt work so i ended up using fsck and when i tried that it said disk it too full. But what i ended up doing is getting all the files i needed of that harddrive and installing os x. Thanks for all your help though.

 

[SweetPete]

I'm glad you got it sorted. Glad I could help