Mac Mini 1TB HDD being 100% full - cant mount, cant boot I just unburied an old 2007 Mac Mini Server which I had put a 1TB drive into. I had kinda forgotten why it broke, but after a while I remembered...the hard way.

That Mac's hard drive is so full and loaded that it pretty much literally has not a single bit - not byte, bit - of free storage. As MacOS tries to extend the disk journal when mounting, it hits a limitation and fails to mount. I realized that during Target Disk Mode when I was hoping to get in there in order to hopefuly just erase some stuff off it so it would boot properly again.

It does actually go into the boot, but it does NOT actually boot - it just hangs up, and stalls.

I am currently considering to try and breach in using GParted - but I am actually not sure if I had encrypted the drive with FileVault... So just in case, here's the question:


How can I possibly resurrect that old Mac Mini Server from my own Mac? I can see the drive as /dev/disk3 and especially the mount voluem as /dev/disk3s2. But with each mounting attempt, a new disk node pops up, eventually even growing beyond 10 (disk10, disk11, ...).
If I can not do that from another Mac, is there something else I can do? Like, I had considered to utilize GParted, but I bet there are also other solutions. Which ones would you recommend?


I also can not absolutely - although its not very likely - rule out that the disk itself is broken too - either the reader or the motor. Any way that I can figure this out?

Thanks!
Create a bootable USB stick and boot the Mac off that. Make sure to use a MacOS version that is at least as recent as the Mac Mini’s date of manufacture, but not so new that it doesn’t support a 2007 Mac Mini. Apple’s instructions for creating a bootable USB drive are here. Then you can mount the hard drive (as long as you have the password, if it’s encrypted) and delete some files. Remember to empty the trash to actually get rid of them.