A Steam game download resulted in a sequence of “cascading failures” that could only be fixed by wiping the entire SSD, rendering an M2 MacBook Pro inoperable.
Though it may be among the most well-liked computers available, the M2 MacBook Pro is far from flawless, as journalist and Apple specialist Glenn Fleishman discovered. He related a story that nobody wants to hear in a post headlined “A disk so full, it couldn’t be restored”: having to wipe a whole disk full of data.
It all started when Fleishman’s youngest child asked them to empty the storage on their Mac—which had become full after installing a Steam game. The user of the laptop was unaware that their storage had already become limited, and after installing the game via Steam, there were only 41KB of free space left on the MacBook Pro.
For the majority of users, this is a very improbable situation because it is impossible to replicate having just 41KB of free space with typical usage. Fortunately, Fleishman—a technical expert—was available to eliminate the Mac’s error messages.
He was unable to utilize the Disk Utility to remove the data, clear the Mac’s trash, or use the terminal software to remove any huge, superfluous files. Both clearing caches and reading forum threads didn’t help either. Because there was so little space left on the device, not even Apple’s Share Disk features worked.
The only choice left was to utilize Time Machine to create a backup copy of the drive after wiping it completely. But, that also failed because of an OS conflict. As a result, the drive on the MacBook would not even mount the disk in Time Machine. Nobody had discovered a fix, according to Fleishman.
However, they were still able to save a few files, which they transferred to an external 1TB drive. Starting from scratch was the only path to take. He closed the post by saying:
“I detest to think what happens to people who haven’t used Macs for decades when they encounter systemic, cascading failures like this, which made me feel powerless even though I thought I understood.”
