I think the partial install had taken up a lot of space. I clicked restart, and it restarted, then asked me what disk I wanted to install El Capitan on, and I picked Macintosh HD and it said not enough space - which surprised me, because I had checked before downloading El Capitan and starting the install that I definitely had enough space. After taking a few hours to start installing, it popped up and said the installation failed, and to click restart to try again. I was installing El Capitan from Snow Leopard. At least terminal says 'read-only file system' when I try to use rmdir on something.

There's already a question exactly like mine: Stuck in update boot (not enough disk space)īut no one has answered it, so I think it's okay to ask it again.ĮDIT: I can also access Terminal which I could potentially also useĮDIT AGAIN: Nevermind, it looks like Macintosh HD is read-only while I'm in this boot menu. Is there a way to get out of this startup menu so I can free up space, or a way to free up space directly from the menu? This is pretty frustrating because it seems like a major design flaw if it tells you you don't have enough storage for a certain thing, but it doesn't let you free up the storage to download the thing. I can open Disk Utility from this menu, and it seems logical to put some method of freeing up disk space from there, but if there is, I can't find it. It doesn't seem like there's a way to free up space from this startup menu, though. Unfortunately, when I downloaded it and restarted my computer, on the 'select the disk on which to install' page the only location, Macintosh HD, didn't have enough space (by about 2 GB). I wanted to upgrade my Macbook 2008 from Yosemite to El Capitan.

How to free up storage on macintosh hd