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Mac Mini: Disk Full Error, Won't Boot, White Screen at Start

A message popped up on my Mac mini saying "Startup disk full/almost full...Delete files to make disk space available". Before I cleaned up my Mac, the system froze and I waited for an hour to see if it would unfreeze by itself. However, no luck. I then pressed and held the power button until my Mac shut down. Now, when I power up my Mac mini, it still won't boot up but shows a white screen. How can I turn on my Mac? Any tips would be much appreciated.

Best Answered by

Connie Yang

Answered on Monday, April 29, 2024

Your Mac almost runs out of space, so that it doesn't have enough space to store the temporary files created by your Mac startup. Then, your Mac fails to boot up but shows a white screen.

If you have an external bootable hard drive, you can use it to boot up your Mac and then clean up your Mac with a professional Mac cleaner like iBoysoft DiskGeeker. This tool's Clean Junk function can scan all the junk files on your Mac startup disk (Macintosh HD - Data) within a minute. Then you can delete them with a click.

If you don't have an external bootable drive, to boot your Mac that won't turn on, you have to enter macOS Recovery Mode to erase your Mac hard drive and then reinstall macOS.

This will cause data loss without a doubt. To get files from your unbootable Mac, you can use iBoysoft Mac Recovery Mode. This special mode allows you to run a single command in Terminal in Recovery Mode to rescue files from an unbootable Mac.

After that, you can get down to erase your Mac and reinstall macOS to make your Mac bootable again.