I have a MBP (2019) that I recently initiated an update to Monterey. The update started, then failed on the Apple logo with around 12 minutes left. On restart it went to my login page, but when I enter the password it just goes back in to the update cycle (black screen with Apple logo) and fails the exact same way. The Mac only has around 14.8GB of free space, so I'm suspecting that's the culprit. I tried booting it into Safe mode, didn't work. I tried booting via live USB into Ubuntu, but the machine is configured not to boot to external drives. I tried the same approach with a copy of Big Sur installed on an external drive, same result (obviously). I've been messing around in Terminal in Recovery trying to free up some space, but I can't seem to get anything in my Users folder. I know there's probably 50GB of pictures across 2 user accounts, I just can't seem to access them. What I'd like to do, is get rid of the update files, get it to log in, then I'll just pull the pictures off to an external drive. If anybody has an alternate/better solution, I'm wide open to suggestions. Any advice? Thanks.
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Stuck in Update Loop, Not Enough Space?
- Thread starter jools5858
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Yeah that's exactly what it was (as I suspected). I was trying to do that from the beginning, but was unable to find any user folders in Terminal. Turns out the main partition wasn't mounted. Once I mounted it in Disk Utility, everything popped up in Terminal and I was able to copy around 25GB of pictures etc.. to an external drive. After that everything finished up as it should have.