So... My amazing wife decided that while she is packing for a business trip would be a good time to update her Mac’s OS. She took an hour to move folders out of her computer to free up 12g on her hard drive for the update.
That’s all the free space her HD had, so of course it ended up needing a bit more space. This led to her aborting the install to increase the space a bit more to something like 13 or 14g free.
Success! It started installing, except it only made it part way and erased part of the old startup folder, and then decided there wasn’t enough space to actually install successfully. So I now have a nice failure loop where it won’t recognize the HD as a legitimate startup option.
And so I’m up at 4am trying to figure out a way to successfully start her computer without erasing the whole HD... because she hasn’t backed it up in over 100 days... which means all the files she needs for her trip would be lost.
And I use Windows, not Mac. So I’m attempting to install onto a SD card now in hopes that I can boot from that, move some more files, and successfully install an OS before she leaves for the airport.
That’s in 2.5 hours. *&^%$&##@%^&
And I have a wicked head cold as well.
Update:
I managed to boot the computer from the SD, but there’s some bug that after erasing 68g of movies the computer’s HD still reads as full for disc utility & the OS installer. It seems to have just written it as being available to be purged if the system needs to do so, but the installer won’t read that.
So she’s taken it with a way to access her files, but she’ll be needing the Mac Genius to figure out how to get the space free to reinstall the OS.