Hi Matthew, A couple of suggestions of things to try before reinstalling the operating system and booting into the recovery partition. (By the way, I've never had to reinstall my operating system because of a failure on my Mac, although there have been times when I've booted from a cloned backup to diagnose or troubleshoot.)
First, try resetting the PRAM when you restart your Mac. Shut down your computer. Press the power on button, listen for the chime, and then immediately press and hold down the Command, Option, P, and R keys. You should keep holding down the Command, Option, P, and R keys until you hear the startup sound chime a second time. Then you can release these keys. (I press the Command and Option keys with the thumb of my left hand, the "R" key with the index finger of my left hand, the "P" key with the thumb of my right hand, and the power button with either the middle finger or forefinger of my right hand.) A check of the Apple discussion forums indicates that some people have had the disk is full message on their MacBook Air laptops when virtual memory is being used and not properly released, or when there are apps in use that have memory leaks. Some people have reported this happening under Mountain Lion with Firefox, for example, although there are other programs that might cause this problem. If the system is using swap space on the disk for virtual memory for running applications, this can result in a disk full error message. You may be able to clear this condition with a restart, and by resetting the PRAM. The other thing that sounds suspicious is the message that the system cannot find a log file. One of the conditions that can lead to reports of a filled disk is when there is a runaway log file. This is a regular system log that has somehow got caught in a loop, with normal messages filling up the file. Do you or your girl friend run any maintenance software on your computer? There are good programs in both the paid and free categories that will check for these kinds of conditions. OnyX is a free app. Cocktail and Tinkertool System are shareware apps (~$14.00). They can clean out caches and log files. You can find these applications at the Macupdate site, which will also give links to the developer's site: • OnyX for Mac https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/111582/onyx * Cocktail https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/10909/cocktail • TinkerTool System https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/13662/tinkertool-system If restarting with setting the PRAM doesn't let you log in and recover, you may have to boot into recovery mode, as Sarah describes. If you have a bootable clone backup saved onto another hard drive, I would connect that drive via the USB port, power up while holding down the Option key, wait 5-10 seconds, then press either the right or left arrow key and then press the return key. Your MBA should boot up from the cloned backup, and you should be able to check out the hard drive. Use Disk Utility (on the cloned backup drive) to repair permissions on the MacBook Air's internal hard drive. The other thing that might help, if resetting the PRAM doesn't let you log in and recover, is to try to boot up in Safe mode. Logging in under Safe mode isn't accessible with VoiceOver, because this mode restricts what gets loaded up in the system, and that doesn't include audio for VoiceOver. However, as part of the procedure for a boot into Safe mode, the system will force a directory check of your startup volume, and also clear off some dynamically loaded cache files. That might be enough to fix things so that you you can boot up normally. The only issue is that since the MacBook Air uses an SSD, you won't be able to hear when the boot up is finished by listening to when the hard drive disk activity stops, as you would be able to do with a Mac laptop using a conventional hard drive. On my MacBook Pro, I can hear when the Safe boot mode activity finishes, and then just restart my Mac by pressing the power button again so that it will boot normally. On the MacBook Air, if you boot into Safe mode by pressing down the Shift key during the power on boot process (and keep holding this down for about 15 seconds or so to make sure this setting takes with the boot up), you have to guess how long to wait until the Safe mode boot finishes. This process takes longer than a normal boot up, because the computer runs the disk directory check as part of the process. So it's like adding in the time it would take you to repair permissions from Disk Utility in addition to the regular boot up process. You just have to leave it for some minutes, before you can press the power on button again for a normal boot up. For more information about Safe Boot mode and what happens when you boot into Safe mode, see the Apple Knowledge Base document: • Mac OS X: What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode? http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1564 I would first try resetting the PRAM and then trying to log in. If you still can't log in at all, then try to do a Safe Boot (by holding down the Shift key when powering on), wait a few minutes for the safe boot to finish, then press the power button again to restart your Mac. If you do manage to log in, try running some maintenance programs. Remember that you you don't release space on your Mac when you put things into the Trash until you empty the Trash. I'd also check the file sizes of log files in your /var/log directory. (These are hidden files and folders by default, but you can navigate there in Finder with the Command-Shift-G "go to folder" shortcut, if you type or paste in: /var/log into the text field and press return. (That's a slash, then "var", then another slash, then "log"). In list view mode, you can sort on the "Size" column and check whether there are any unusually large files (using units larger than KB). If none of that works, then try booting into the recovery partition, as Sarah suggests. HTH. Cheers, Esther On 4 Jun 2013, at 07:04, Sarah k Alawami wrote: > Before you do that see if you can boot in to th recovery consul by holding > down cmd plus r at start up. If you can, turn on voice over and go to disk > utilities and scan the hd for any disk issues, if it finds them click repair > then try again. then repair permissions on the drive. > > Good luck. and hope this helps. If not you might have to reinstall the os. > On Jun 4, 2013, at 8:26 AM, Isaac Hebert <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Are you able to reinstall the operating system? >> >> On 6/4/13, matthew Dyer <[email protected]> wrote: >>> Hi all, >>> >>> My gf has an MBA and every time she boots up she receives a message that it >>> can not find a log file and she is unable to log in to her system do to >>> this. She is also getting a message that her disk is full and she really >>> doesn't have anything on the drive. Any ideas on how to fix this. It just >>> started with this lastnight. 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