M2 MacBook Pro rendered unusable after running out of space in “cascading failures”

An M2 MacBook Pro was rendered unusable after a Steam game download caused a series of “cascading failures” that could only be resolved by erasing the entire SSD.

The M2 MacBook Pro might be one of the most popular laptops out there, but it’s far from being perfect, as journalist and Apple expert Glenn Fleishman found out. In a post titled “A disk so full, it couldn’t be restored” he recounted a tale that no one wants to face: Being forced to wipe an entire disk, full of data.

It began when Fleishman’s youngest child approached them about clearing their Mac’s storage, which had been filled after installing a Steam game. Unbeknownst to the owner of the laptop, their storage had already become cramped, and the installation of the game from Steam left the MacBook Pro with just 41KB free on the drive.

Now, this is a very, very unlikely scenario for most users, as having only 41KB of space left is impossible to recreate with ordinary use. But, luckily, being a technical expert, Fleishman was on hand to get rid of the Mac’s error messages.

However, he was unable to empty the Mac’s trash, use the Mac’s terminal app to delete any large unnecessary fles, or use the Disk Utility to delete the data. Clearing caches, and following forum posts didn’t yeild any success either. Even Apple’s Share Disk functions failed to work due to the meager amount of space left on the device.

So, the only option left was to, go nuclear, and wipe the drive entirely, then use Time Machine to back up the drive. But, due to an OS conflict, that didn’t work either. This caused the MacBook’s drive to refuse to even mount the disk in Time Machine. “no one had found a solution”, Fleishman wrote.

But, they were sitll manage to salvage some files, and put it onto an external 1TB drive. The only route to go down was to entirely start fresh. At the end of the post, he concluded:

“I hate to think what people without decades of Mac experience do when confronted with systemic, cascading failures like this when I felt helpless despite what I thought I knew “

While Apple looks poised to launch OLED iPads, new AirPods and even robots, maybe their software team should also look at how users could possibly recover from this scenario without wiping an entire disk.