My 2011 MacBook Pro was upgraded with an SSD, and I disregarded the Mac’s warnings that the disk space was insufficient! Before I left my Mac idle for a week, everything appeared to be fine. It stayed at the progress bar when I tried to start it again. I tried starting in safe mode; the progress indicator goes farther than it does when starting in normal mode, but the startup never ends. Additionally, I was unable to enter the Users directory when I booted up in Recovery Mode. Which path in macOS Recovery Mode will take me from Terminal to my Users directory? Or is there another way I may remove files from my startup drive to make room for them?
The OS needs some free disk space to maintain normal performance on your Mac when it is insufficient, it is perhaps that the directory structure or certain system files were corrupted and rendered the drive unbootable.
As you can get into macOS Recovery Mode, you can try to run First Aid in Disk Utility to check and repair the disk errors, if it works, try to reboot the Mac again to see whether it successfully starts up.
Besides, you can also try a macOS USB bootable disk to boot up the Mac, so you can access the Mac hard drive to free up disk on Mac.
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Have you backed up the Mac drive data? If you have a Time Machine backup, and macOS Recovery Mode or USB bootable installer don’t work, you can try to reinstall macOS, if it fails, perform a clean macOS installation on your device.
If there is no backup, you can try to recover data from macOS Recovery Mode using third-party data recovery software via Terminal, you can follow this link: How to Run iBoysoft Data Recovery in macOS Recovery Mode?
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I can’t boot up my Mac even after running First Aid. And I don’t have another computer to create a bootable disk.