Blessing and a curse: I have boot camp installed, which is a blessing because I still have some computer access to post this, but it's a curse because when I hold Shift to start the mac safe mode and scan, it detects a working Windows and a non-working Mac OS X, and ignores my Shift-holding, and boots directly to Windows. Set the default startup disk. You can change the startup disk your Mac automatically uses from System Preferences. From the Apple menu choose System Preferences. Click the Startup Disk icon in System Preferences, or choose View Startup Disk. Select your startup disk from the list of available volumes. The next time you start up or restart. Change your startup disk for every startup. On your Mac, choose Apple menu System Preferences, then click Startup Disk. If the lock at the bottom left is locked, click it to unlock the preference pane. Click the icon of the disk you want to use, then click Restart. WARNING: When selecting a network startup volume, make sure you select a.
If you are a Mac user, you may receive the “Your startup disk is almost full” error message sooner or later. Accompanied by this error message, you may also have problem with your Mac performance, such as Mac runs slowly, application does not work properly, and more. All these indicate that your Mac startup disk is lack of free storage. Here we will explain what is “startup disk full” and how to clean your Mac hard drive to solve the full startup disk issue.
Fix “Startup Disk is Almost Full” Error
- Part 1. Why Startup Disk is Full and How to Check Storage on Mac
- Part 2. How to Fix Startup Disk Full Issue with Powerful Utility
- Part 3. Basic Tips to Clean up Your Mac
Part 1. Why Startup Disk is Full and How to Check Storage on Mac
First of all, what is a startup disk? A startup disk is a volume or partition of a drive that contains a usable operating system, user data and applications, etc.
Generally speaking, most users have just one disk but some will have two or more. No matter you have one or more disks on your Mac, the one with the Mac OS installed is your startup disk.
Why is your startup disk full?
The reason why you receive the error message that “Your startup disk is almost full” is obvious. It’s full because there is no more space on your disk. Generally speaking, there should be at least 15% free space left on your startup disk to make sure your Mac can run smoothly. So if you received the warning message that “your startup disk is almost full”, it’s the high time that you should free up the space on your startup disk immediately.
How to check the storage on your Mac
If you received the error message “Your startup disk is almost full” on your Mac, you can check the disk storage on your Mac to discover what is taking up the most of space of your startup disk. Follow the steps below to have an overview on the storage of your startup disk.
From here you can intuitively see how much space is left on your startup disc and what’s eating up your storage space. In order to fix the startup disk full error, it’s time to remove all the unnecessary or large files from the hard drive in order to free up more space on your Mac.
Part 2. How to Fix Startup Disk Full Issue with Powerful Utility
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To clean up your startup disk, the fastest and easiest way is to use a professional Mac cleaning tool. Here we recommend the most professional Mac cleaning tool for you- Aiseesoft Mac Cleaner.
Aiseesoft Mac Cleaner is professional in removing junk files, large/old files, deleting duplicate images/files and monitoring your Mac performance. It’s able to clean up all worthless files from your startup disk with 100% security.
- Scan and clear useless cache/logs, junk files on Mac.
- Eliminate email attachments, unnecessary iTunes backups and app localization.
- Find and remove duplicate files or folders on your startup disk.
- Uninstall unwanted applications and delete their associated files on Mac.
- Monitor your Mac performance in disk utilization, battery status, memory performance as well as CPU usage.
- Shred your files to make it irrecoverable so that your privacy can be protected.
Steps to clean up startup disk with Mac Cleaner
You can also clean system junk files, trash files, duplicated files and more with other modules like 'System Junk', 'iPhoto Junk', 'Duplicate Finder', 'Trash Bin' and so on. The steps are the same as that in “Large & Old Files” module.
In this way you can clean up the unnecessary files that are occupying your startup disk space selectively and quickly.
Click Toolkit > Uninstall to scan all the applications installed on your Mac. After scanning, click “View” to preview the scan results and choose the software you want to uninstall. Then it will uninstall the application and remove the associated files for you.
Using Mac Cleaner regularly can help you monitor your Mac performance, so that the startup disk almost full issue can be prevented well.
Part 3. Basic Tips to Clean up Your Mac
If you want to clean your startup disk manually, you can follow the basic tips below to delete different kinds of junk files or unnecessary files one by one. But it will take you much time.
1. Empty Trash
We are used to remove unwanted files from Mac to Trash but often forget to empty the Trash regularly. Therefore, the files in your Trash will still eat up your startup disk space. So it’s significant to clear your Trash frequently. You can delete the files in your Trash permanently in two methods. Right-click on the Trash in the dock panel and select Empty Trash, or open the Trash and click the Empty button in the top right corner.
2. Clear Cache
A cache file is a temporary data file created by apps, browsers and other programs to make your Mac run faster. And it’ll be recreated next time when you use the application. There is a chance that you no longer use an application but its cache files still exist on your startup disk and occupy tens of gigabytes of your disk memory. So it’d be a good habit to clear the cache data from time to time.
You can find the cache data in two locations in your Mac: /Library/Caches and ~/Library/Caches. In /Library/Caches you will find the temporary files created by the system, these files will not occupy too much space. While in the ~/Library/Caches location, you will see a large amount of cache files created when you run applications. So this folder size will increase continuously.
To find the Library folder, you can open the Finder window, from Menu click Go > Go to Folder, then type ~/Library/Caches in the dialog box and click Go.
3. Remove Language Resources
Do you know that there are 26 pre-installed dictionaries of 818 Mb in your system? Apart from English, there are Chines, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Russian and other languages. Normally we only need to use two or three languages, so it’d be better that you delete unnecessary dictionaries if you are sure that you don’t need them at all. They are stored in /Macintosh HD/Users/Your User/Library/ Dictionaries. You can easily determine which files should be deleted by their name.
4. Clean up Downloads, Movies and Music Folders
Delete downloads, movies and music you don’t need to use any more will take much load off your Mac. There may be some movies that you have watched several times and don’t want to delete. But sometimes you need to make a sacrifice for the health of your Mac. A compromise is to archive the movies or music you really don’t want to delete then delete the rest of them.
5. Delete Old iTunes Backups
If you sync your iPhone with iTunes frequently, there will be multiple of backup copies on your Mac. It’d be a good choice to delete the old backups to free up more space on Mac. Launch your iTunes, go to Menu Bar > iTunes > Preferences, you will see a list of all the backups iTunes have made for you. You can delete the old iTunes backups after you confirm that you don’t need them anymore.
Conclusion:
Compared with clean up your startup disk manually, using Mac Cleaner is more time-saving and easy to operate. What’s more, it can do more than what you do manually. If you meet with “Your startup disk is almost full” error when you need to do tasks urgently with your Mac, it’d be better to get help from Mac Cleaner to get rid of the trouble as soon as possible. If you are patient and have enough time, you can choose to clean up your Mac manually, perhaps it’s a new way to learn more about your Mac.
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Sep 06, 2019 Or use the OS X installation disc that came with your machine — or buy a new one — to boot up and install OS X on your Mac’s hard drive. Related: How to downgrade from macOS Mojave to macOS High Sierra; Factory reset MacBook Air and other Macs with macOS; How to create a macOS Catalina USB installer; macOS could not be installed, how-to fix.
The internal hard drive of your Mac, also known as Macintosh HD or startup disk, is used to store operating system directory and other data, supporting computer to work in a normal manner. It could be SSD, yet the internal hard drive may not show up on the Mac, Finder or Disk Utility, stoping you from accessing your data or booting your Mac up.
Fortunately, there are some means to fix the internal hard drive not showing up issue. Basically, it depends on if you can boot the Mac when internal hard drive is not showing up.
Case 1: The internal hard drive is not showing up but Mac boots up
If you can't see the internal hard drive but you can start and use your Mac normally, the good news is that your macOS volume (which usually is the Macintosh HD) is working fine. To access other files on the internal hard drive normally, you can try the following solutions.
Solution 1: Change the Mac's settings to show the internal hard drive
If your Mac computer works in a normal state but the internal hard drive is not showing up in Finder or on desktop. This is because the system is not set up to display hard drives in Finder or on desktop. Here are some simple fixes for this:
1. Go to Finder > Preferences > General tab and select 'Hard disks' to make internal hard drives show on the desktop.
2. Go to Finder > Preferences > Sidebar tab and select 'Hard disks'. Then your internal hard drive should be showing up in the Finder.
Instead, if the Mac doesn't display your external hard drive, you can check 'External disk' in this tab also to make it visible.
3. If the 'Hard disks' option is ticked but internal hard drive is not showing up in the Finder still, open the Finder, put your mouse at Locations in the left sidebar and see if it displays 'Show' or 'Hide'. Click and change to identify if your internal hard drive is hidden by the Finder.
Solution 2: Check whether the internal hard drive is showing up in Disk Utility
The internal hard drive still not showing up/mounting on Mac? Well, you really need to check it in Disk Utility. You can make use of Disk Utility to perform any disk volume-related tasks. Normally, if the hard disk or SSD is listed in the left sidebar of Disk Utility, you can leave out the hardware problems.
Mac Not Detecting Hdd
If you find the internal hard drive showing up in Disk Utility but some partitions or APFS volumes of the hard drive are lost, the drive may have some file system corruptions. Hopefully, we can provide several clues to help you isolate and troubleshoot most logical disk errors.
Mac Startup Disk Download
1. Mount the internal hard drive on Mac
Sometimes, aninternal hard drive won't mount on Mac, it's time to force it to mount. Simply go to Disk Utility > choose the unmounted internal hard drive > Mount.
2. Run First Aid to repair the internal hard drive
If the internal hard drive is still not mounting on Mac, you can run First Aid to verify and repair various issues like partition table lost and file system corruption. You can go to Disk Utility > choose the greyed out partitions under internal hard drive > click First Aid > choose Run.
Data recovery from corrupted internal hard drive
If unfortunately,Disk Utility can't repair the disk, the corruptions on the internal hard drive are so serious. In this situation, all data on the drive is so fragile that any operation will overwrite it. To prevent further data loss, especially when you have no backup of the data, it's better to immediately recover lost data from the internal hard drive with reliable Mac data recovery software like iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
Case 2: Internal hard drive is not showing up and you can't boot up the Mac
When you can't access the internal hard drive because the Mac is not booting up, you can try these solutions.
Solution 1: Repair the internal hard drive in macOS Recovery Mode
When your Mac won't boot as there is no statup disk, you can try to check if you can find the internal hard drive in macOS Recovery Mode by the following steps.
Step 1: Boot your Mac into macOS Recovery mode. Start your Mac and hold down the Command +R + Option keys simultaneously until you see an Apple logo or spinning globe. Then release the keys.
Step 2: Select Disk Utility from the macOS Utilities menu.
Step 3: Select the corrupted internal hard drive from the left-hand panel if you can see it.
Step 4: Click First Aid on the top and wait while it verifying and repairing errors.
Solution 2: Check the internal hard drive that won't show up in Terminal
If the internal hard drive disappeared from your iMac or Mac mini, you can check the internal hard drive in Terminal, especially for a internal Fusion drive. The reason is that when an internal Fusion drive is split, you can't see it showing up on Mac normally. Instead, it would be split into an extra SSD and a hard drive, making the internal fusion hard drive invisible. Brother dcp 7020 driver mac os x.
If you can see them with correct storage capacity by the command line 'diskutil list', you need to recover lost data from the internal hard drive with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac to avoid data loss and then fix a split fusion drive as soon as possible.
But if you can't see the fusion hard drive with right disk information, you'd better call 1-800-275-2273(US) or contact Apple for support.
How to recover lost data when the internal hard drive is not showing up on Mac?
When your internal hard drive is not showing up in Terminal or in Disk Utility under Recovery Mode, then your hard drive should have some serious corruption. In this case, the data on the unbootable Mac is a great concern for you for sure. To prevent losing important files, you can get your data off the internal hard drive with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is free Mac hard drive data recovery software that helps you recover documents, pictures, audios, videos, emails from internal and external hard drives. It can recover lost data when the hard drive is not showing up, not recognized, not mounted, not readable. What's more, this program can also recover lost data from formatted or corrupted Macintosh HD external hard drives, USB flash drives, SD cards, etc. Even when your Mac is not booting up, the program can regain access to your machine without taking out the internal hard drive.
It is compatible with macOS 10.15/10.14/10.13/10.12 and Mac OS X 10.11/10.10/10.9/10.8/10.7.
How to recover lost data from internal hard drive when Mac can access the Internet?
If you have only one Mac computer, please directlyrun iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac in macOS Recovery mode and recover lost data from the unbootable Mac computer. This solution is highly recommended because it is easier and more effective.
Note: Before you follow the steps below, you have to make sure your Mac has Internet connection.
1. Reboot this Mac and press Command +Option +R keys.
2. Choose a network for your Mac. You need to make your Mac connected to the Internet all the time.
3. Click Utilities in the top menu and select Terminal from the drop-down menu.
4. Run the following command:
This will launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac through iBoysoft Server.
5. Select the internal hard drive and recover lost data with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac with its wizard.
How to recover lost data from internal hard drive when Mac can't access the Internet?
If the unbootable Mac is unable to be connected with the Internet or WiFi, additionally, you need to find another workable Mac to help you recover lost data.
Step 1: Download iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac on another Mac computer.
Step 2: Install and launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac on the healthy Mac computer.
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Step 3: Click iBoysoft Data Recovery on the menu bar and then select 'Create Boot Drive'.
Step 4: Insert a USB drive into the healthy Mac computer.
Step 5: Follow the wizard to create a bootable recovery drive on the USB drive.
Step 6: When the creation process completes, you can insert the USB drive into the unbootable Mac computer, and then press the Power button and Option key (⌥) to start the Mac up.
Step 7: Select iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac from the boot options.
Note: If you're running macOS Mojave or earlier, iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac will launch immediately when your Mac boots up. But, if your Mac is running macOS Catalina, you need two additional steps to launch this program.
Step 8: Wait for your Mac to boot up, open 'Terminal' application from 'Utilities' drop-down menu.
Step 9: Run the following command:
Now you can recover lost data from the corrupted internal hard drive.
Erase the internal hard drive and reinstall macOS
External Hard Drive Not Detected
After retrieving data from the corrupted internal hard drive, you can reformat the internal hard disk to make it usable again.
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Step 1: Boot your Mac to macOS Recovery mode.
Step 2: Select Disk Utility from the macOS Utilities menu.
Step 3: Select the corrupted internal hard drive from the sidebar.
Step 4: Click on Erase from the top.
Step 5: Setup the required information to reformat the disk and click Done when finished.
Step 6: Go back to macOS Utilities screen and select Reinstall macOS.
But if your internal hard drive is not showing up in Disk Utility, the drive may have hardware problems. In this case, none of software is helpful. But you can try to boot up your Mac in Safe Boot or reset the PRAM / NVRAM, and then see if the internal hard drive is showing up on your Mac.
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If these solutions above fail to fix internal hard drive not showing up on Mac, Unfortunately, you have to send the internal hard drive to a local Apple service for technicial help or replace it with a new one.