Erasing Free Space on boot drive

I am getting ready to sell my older Mac Book Air with a SSD. I would like to erase all free space on the drive to assure that any confidential data I hadn't securely deleted earlier is not recoverable. In my most recent cleanup, I moved all my own files and installed apps to the trash and attempted to empty the trash securely. When the number of files to be removed was down to 30,000 (from neaerly 100,000) it stopped securely removing them. I rebooted several times and those files were still in the trash. I attempted each time to securely empty the trash. It would pop up the progress dialog box but would immeidately close it cleaning up nothing. Finally, I switched to non-secure and emptied the Trash.
I've done to the Disk Utility, selected the SSD Drive (Macintosh HD) and selected the Erase tab. The Erase Free Space button is disabled. How can I securely clean up the free space so that whoever buys the system will not be able to recover whatever, confidential data may still be hanging around in the free disk space list?
Thanks,

read this article, it is outdated, but the info in it is still relevant: http://support.apple.com/kb/TA24002. Do a 7 pass erase. That conformed to the U.S. Department of Defense's security procedures until they changed their rules to that of completely destroying hard drives physically instead.

Similar Messages

I made a dumb decision to 'Erase Free Space' on my drive. I now have no free space, I realize because it wrote 0's over all my free space. Is there a way to undo this??? Help please I can't save any documents now! Thanks in advance all, it is truly apprec

I made a dumb decision to 'Erase Free Space' on my drive. I now have no free space, I realize because it wrote 0's over all my free space. Is there a way to undo this??? Help please I can't save any documents now! Thanks in advance all, it is truly appreciated. how can find the hidden temporary files using the terminal what do i type in?

It's more likely a failed Erase Free Space, which creates a huge temporary file; that's why it looks like you have no more available drive space. You can recover from this. See these links
https://discussions.apple.com/message/10938738#10938738
http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/quickie/recovering_from_a_failed_secure_erase_fre e_space
Post back if you need any help with this.

Does Erase Free Space Degrade Hard Drive?

I've noticed with my macbook that erasing free space takes bloody ages, 2 hours for 1 pass, 18 for 7 pass, 3 days for 35 pass.
This seems like an awful long time to have your laptop sitting on and open let alone your disc spinning and writing. Does this process degrade, slow down or have any seriously harmful side-effects to your hard drive?

My question is simply, 3 days of nonstop writing to zero out free space from insecure trash empties (some people might have important goverment docs, I don't know) seems like long enough to burn out your drive in one single process, no?
No, not unless the drive is already perilously close to failure when you begin the process.
And with their awkward sleep with lid closed standard feature, you have to leave the laptop sitting open and running... 3 days, surely that'll cause some problems?
Are you concerned that running the computer with its display open is hazardous to its health? Nothing could be farther from the truth. It cools itself more efficiently with the display open than with the display closed. Apart from that, having the lid open or closed makes no difference at all.
Out of curiosity, what do you consider "awkward" about having the computer go to sleep when you close the display?
I agree with Michael that if one were to do a 35-pass erase of free space every week, or even every month, it would become a significant factor in the longevity of the drive. But doing it a small handful of times over the life of the drive — say perhaps once a year — would account for only an insignificant portion of the drive's total use/operation.

Free space on boot drive constantly decreases until reboot

Hi there. I have a really weird thing happening that I've never seen before.
I'm running 10.7.4 on an iMac, and have about 45GB free on the system drive. At least that's right after I boot up the system. After that, the free space available on my HD slowly but constantly decreases, and the computer slowly but surely becomes less responsive. When the free space on the boot drive gets down around 37GB (which takes 2-3 days... I usually never turn the machine off) I get so many spinning beach balls... in ALL applications... that the computer becomes basically unuseable and I am forced to reboot. But as soon as I do, free space is back up to 45GB, and computer is snappy and fast again.
What the heck?

Your problem is excessive swapping of data between physical memory and virtual memory.
That can happen for two reasons:
(1) You have a long-running process with a memory leak (i.e., a bug), or
(2) You don't have enough memory installed for your usage pattern.
Tracking down a memory leak can be difficult, and it may come down to a process of elimination. In Activity Monitor, select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected. Click the heading of the Real Mem column in the process table once or twice to sort the table with the highest value at the top. If one process (not including "kernel_task") is using much more memory than all the others, that could be an indication of a leak. A better indication would be a process that continually grabs more and more memory over time without ever releasing it.
This suggestion is only for users familiar with the shell. For a more precise, but potentially misleading, test, run the following command:
sudo leaks -nocontext -nostacks process | grep total
where process is the name of a process you suspect of leaking memory. Almost every process will leak some memory; the question is how much, and especially how much the leak increases with time. I can’t be more specific. See the leaks(1) man page and the Apple developer documentation for details:
Memory Usage Performance Guidelines: About the Virtual Memory System
If you don't have an obvious memory leak, your options are to install more memory (if possible) or to run fewer programs simultaneously.

'erase free space' not secure - it doesn't seem to work?

Just wanted to point out that the erase free space option in Mountain Lion does not seem to work, at all.
A week ago I ran erase free space on my primary data drive then later, out of curiosity, I ran an inexpensive third party recovery program on the disk just to see what happened. Interestingly enough the recovery software was able to find and restore files that I had deleted over a year ago.
This has me thinking, so today I tried it again, only with a 7 pass erase this time. Nope, same thing. After a 7 pass erase (erase free space) this low end, less than $35 recovery software turns up tons of files, everything from stuff I just deleted a few days ago to stuff from over a year ago.
If I'm doing something wrong I would love for someone to point it out to me. Not that I'm toting state secrets or anything on my mac, but still - my privacy is important to me and I assume it is to others.
I'd encourage folks to try this out for themselves.
My set up is a 2011 macbook pro with an SSD as the boot drive, I've got a second harddrive installed in the optical bay and this is where my home folder lives. The secondary drive is the drive where I'm running erase free space.
The only thing that I can think of is that, even though the button is not greyed out, maybe I need to be booted to recovery in order to succesfully run erase free space on system drives?
Any input would be greatly appreciated, otherwise this seems like a pretty ugly security lapse on the part of Apple. Imagine if you're selling your machine and secure erasing before turnign it over to its new owner - and the new owner can run a $35 dollar recovery program and access everything on your machine.
Not good.

Thanks for your response, William.
I think that the issue may have to do with being booted to the system while trying to erase free space. I ran a 7 pass erase free space on a 1TB external Lacie drive this afternoon, the operation took a bit over 6 hours to complete and recovery sofatware is turning up nothing.
This is in contrast to the main drive, which my original post referenced, which is a 500gb 7200 rpm internal drive. A 7 pass secure erase took less than 5 minutes to complete - so, even though the drive is 1/2 the size, there's obviously something not right with the 7 minutes time to complete.
Tomorrow I'm going to try either booting to another account (which doesn't utilize this partcular disk) or booting to recovery and seeing what happens.
I have a feeling that this will solve the problem - I'll post back tomorrow evening.

I need to erase free space on my hard drive. But when I am in disk utility the format and name are pale as is the erase free space button so I cannot erase free space.

My start up disk is full. I have been through my computer and erased a lot of music and video to free some space. I then went to disk utility to erase free space and find that the erase free space button is pale and therefore won't work. Nor can I select or deselect MacOS extended journaled.
Advice please?!

Recovering Disk Space
If you have less than 20% disk space then it is time to roll up your sleeves and search for what you can delete and what you can offload to another disk.
If you have less than 10 GB you definitely need to delete or offload some files or purchase a lager disk or SSD (see below). You may want to maintain at least 20 GB of free space so when your disk starts filling again it will have some room before it hits that 10 GB mark again. More headroom is better. If you let the space fall much below 9 GB you might not be able to boot your machine.
Initial easy steps to gain disk space:
- Delete all files in the Downloads folder.
Empty the Trash.
- Start iPhoto.
Empty its trash.
Restart.
- Restart in Safe Mode:
Restart the computer.
As soon as you hear the chime press and hold the right shift key.
Be patient. Hold it down until you see the Apple icon.
Empty the trash.
Restart in normal mode.
- Delete "Recovered Messages", if any.
    Hold the option key down and click "Go" menu in the Finder menu bar.
    Select "Library" from the drop down menu.
    Library > Mail > V2 > Mailboxes
    Delete "Recovered Messages", if any.
- Empty the Trash.
- Restart.
- Re-index your system disk (Macintosh HD):
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2409
Time Machine Snapshots:
If your disk is 80% full that is normal. Time Machine uses up to 80% of the disk space for local snapshots. To get rid of these snapshots simply plug in your Time Machine backup drive and run a backup. See About Time Machine's 'local snapshots' on Mac notebooks: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4878 and What are Local Snapshots? http://pondini.org/TM/30.html .
If you are concerned that the “Other” category of disk usage is taking too much space and for information on deleting files then look here: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-5142
Backup:
Run a Time Machine (or other) backup since you are about to delete and move files and you may need to recover from any inadvertent mistakes or decisions. You will need one external hard drive for your Time Machine (or other) backup and a second if you plan to offload some files. (See suggestions for where to purchase hard drives at the end of this message.)
For more about backups:
Time Machine Basics: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427
Most commonly used backup methods:
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3045
Methodology to protect your data. Backups vs. Archives. Long-term data protection:
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6031
Deleting files:
Then use the free application OmniDiskSweeper http://www.omnigroup.com/more to explore your volume in descending order by size so you can attack the problem from the top down, deleting the largest unwanted files first. Delete with caution and do not delete any system files. Remember to empty the trash after trashing the files.
Additional reference on freeing disk space:
http://pondini.org/OSX/DiskSpace.html
Offloading files:
Consider moving some of the no-often-used large files or directories to an external disk. Use ODS again to find them. As noted above this will be at least your second hard drive. Your first one(s) is/are for your Time Machine (or other) backup(s). Do not offload files onto a Time Machine disk.
Format the second drive as Mac OS Extended (journaled). Using OWS to find large files/folders and copy them from the system drive to the external hard drive and delete them from your internal drive.
Then  > System Preferences > Time Machine > Options… > Remove the offload HD name from the exclusions list.
Now both your system disk and your external offload disk will be backed up onto your Time Machine disk.
From: http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/freeingspace.html
To move your iTunes Music folder to another disk or partition:
To change the location of your iTunes Music folder, carefully follow the instructions in the AppleCare® Knowledge Base document "iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Music folder."Additional information can be found in iTunes Help.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.thexlab.com/105/ 00000849.html
Laptop users may want to consider having two iTunes libraries: a small library of current favorites on their computer, while their complete library resides on an external hard drive. Utilities like iTunes Library Manager enable you to easily have multiple iTunes libraries you can use with your account. https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/7689/itunes-library-manager
To move your iPhoto Library folder to another disk or partition:
To move the iPhoto Library folder to a new location, employ the instructions in the AppleCare Knowledge Base document from http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2506 corresponding to the version of iPhoto you are using. Additional information can be found in iPhoto Help.
Laptop users may want to consider having two iPhoto libraries: a small library of current, favorite photographs on their computer, while their complete library, or archives of older photos are saved on an external hard drive. Utilities such as iPhoto Buddy and iPhoto Library Manager enable you to have multiple iPhoto libraries that you can use with your account.
https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/12175/iphoto-buddy
https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/7158/iphoto-library-manager
Hardware — Bigger disk/SSD:
If your system has upgradeable storage then if you are still tight on disk space consider larger storage. If you have a disk consider replacing it with a one TB disk. Check out a one terabyte HGST 7K1000 7200 rpm, SATA III drive from OWC http://eshop.macsales.com ($100). If you have an SSD consider increasing its capacity to 240 or 480 GB. A standard 240 GB SSD would cost from $200 to $280. See OWC and Crucial: http://www.crucial.com/ for options. OWC sells 120, 240 and 480 GB SSD upgrades for MacBook Airs. A 240 GB upgrade costs $265.   http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/ . If your Mac is under warranty or AppleCare replacing the SSD will void the warranty.
PlotinusVeritas gives some great suggestions for purchasing external hard drives in this thread:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5602141?tstart=0

Erase Free Space vs Reformat Hard Drive

I am getting ready to sell my computer. In the past I have had troubles when I reformatted my hard and then reinstalled the OS. If I use "Erase Free Space" from the Disk Utility and choose 7 pass overwrite should I be confident that all deleted personal information will be securely removed?
Thanks
12" PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.8) 768 MB RAM, Superdrive

It would be simpler, not to mention much, much faster, to do an Erase and Install of OS X. If you've had problems with the hard drive in the past, then I suggest doing the following before installing:
Extended Hard Drive Preparation
1. Boot from your OS X Installer Disk. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger.)
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Set the number of partitions from the dropdown menu (use 1 partition unless you wish to make more.) Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled, if supported.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the volume(s) mount on the Desktop.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled, if supported.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process will take 30 minutes to an hour or more depending upon the drive size.
After formatting has completed quit DU and return to the installer. Now proceed with the OS X installation. When the installation has completed DO NOT RESTART. Instead simply shut down the computer. When the new owner starts up the computer it will automatically start up in the Setup Assistant as if new out of the box.
Why reward points?(Quoted from Discussions Terms of Use.)
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Members may reward you with 5 points if they deem that your reply is helpful and 10 points if you post a solution to their issue. Likewise, when you mark a reply as Helpful or Solved in your own created topic, you will be awarding the respondent with the same point values.

How can I erase My hard drive. Disk utility only gives me the option of erase free space. I have 27in iMac with Lion and 12 gb ram.

How can I erase my hard drive? Disk utility only gives me the option to erase free space.
Thanks for any assistance.

Drive Preparation for Lion
1. Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button. Select Disk Utility from the main menu and click on the Continue button.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Quit DU to return to the main menu.
5. Select Reinstall Lion then click on the Continue button. You need an active network connection in order to download the Lion software.

My external hard drive accidentally switched off during Disk Utility's "erase free space" process. I restarted the external hard drive and Disk Utility, but now I get the "couldn't mount disk" error when trying to finish the erase. Please help!

My external Lacie Quadra hard drive accidentally switched off in the middle of "erase free space", and when I switched it back on Disk Utility was hanging. So I Force Quit Disk Utility and restarted it. Now when I try to erase I get
"Secure Disk Erase failed with the error: Couldn’t unmount disk."
But "erase free space" seems to work...
What can I do? I'm erasing as I'm giving the drive to someone else and I wanted to wipe it clean.
Also should I use "erase" or "erase free space" if I want to wipe the drive clean?
Please help!

Sorry I don't really understand.... there are no partitions on the drive. How do I repartition it?
And should I use "erasing free space" or "erase" for wiping clean my drive of everything? Erase seems to be faster last tiem I tried.
Thanks!

USB Flash Drive: Trying to recover space from "erase free space" problem. Finder shows no files i

Hi,
I have an 8gb flash usb drive. (recognizes 7.5gb)
I must have stop the operation or use erase free space orsomething stupid. Regardless, i just want to get it back to full capacity of7.5 gb. I think right now its only 6.2 gb. Finder shows no files inside thedrive. Let me know what i need to do. I try looking at different webpages aboutsparseimage file or 00 written in place of my missing 1.3 gb. But i dont knowhow to get it back. I am new to OSX, so please help me with clear instructions.Thanks

You can reformat it. Plug the drive in, launch Disk Utility (in your Alications> Utilities folder). Select the dove, theme erace/reformat it.
Just be carefully you accidentally don't erase any other external drives!

After using "erase free space," hard drive has almost no available capacity

I decided to clean all the files off my iMac as I wasn't using it as my primary computer anymore. After deleting the files, I used Disk Utility and used "erase free space" with the 7x option. I also emptied the Trash folder.
When I checked the HD, I found:
Capacity: 297.77 GB
Available: 4.68 GB
Used: 293.09 GB
This makes no sense to me, since there is very little on the computer (some applications). Also, before I started, I know there was about 260 GB available.
I'd appreciate some advice on how to "free up" the available space that I know must be there.
Thanks!

Hi, sounds like the secure erase didn't finish maybe & left a big invisible file on there.
How much free space is on the HD, where has all the space gone?
OmniDiskSweeper is likely the easiest/best, and is now free...
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/download/

Erase free space function of Disk Utility

Hi all,
I've read some of the discussions about the problems that can result from using Disk Utility to permanently delete items that have been emptied from the Trash (and which were not "securely" emptied). Before I use the Disk Utility function, I'd appreciate some advice:
1. I have an iBook G4, running Mac OS 10.4.11. My hard disk has a capacity of 55 GB with 30 GB available. Does the capacity available matter, and is mine sufficient?
2. Will I be given an option on overwriting the files 0, 7, or 35 times, and should I choose 7?
3. How long is this operation likely to take?
4. Shall I just start the operation and then not touch the computer for a few hours, or overnight, and hope for the best??
5. A final question (a stupid one, I hope!) -- only those files which were put in the trash will be deleted, right?? Not anything else?!
I am quite worried about taking the step because, if things go wrong, I won't have a means of contacting the Apple support forum as this is the only computer in our household.
I am planning on giving this iBook to a nephew in six months or so, and am gradually cleaning it up for that purpose. But I'm not ready to "zero it out" entirely and I am hoping not to lose anything currently on my hard drive following the "erase free space" operation, or to have to reboot from the original CDs.
If the operation is successful, I will then remember to always use the "Secure Empty Trash" option when deleting future files. I'm assuming that, if I do that, I should have no concerns about giving the laptop away -- correct?
As you can tell, I'm not very computer savvy, and I'd be very grateful for help. Thank you!

Open Disk Utility, Highlight your drive on the left, then on the right bottom you'll see Verify Disk & below that Repair Disk grayed out because you can't reopair the HD yo're booted from, if it does need Repair...
1. Insert the Mac OS X Install disc, then restart the computer while holding the C key.
2. When your computer finishes starting up from the disc, choose Disk Utility from the Installer menu. (In Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you must select your language first.)
*Important: Do not click Continue in the first screen of the Installer. If you do, you must restart from the disc again to access Disk Utility.*
3. Click the First Aid tab.
4. Select your Mac OS X volume.
5. Click Repair. Disk Utility checks and repairs the disk."
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
Then try a Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, reboot when it completes

TS4272 erase free space stuck on creating temporary file

I upgraded to 10.7.4 and followed instructions in http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4272
At step 9 Disk Utility is stuck on 'creating temporary file' for the last 24 hours. I have canceled and tried more than once.

This may be a problem with Disk Utility on your boot drive. Try rebooting to the Recovery HD and using Disk Utility on that partition (it should appear in the OS X Tools menu). You might also try running a disk verification and repair to ensure the filesystem and partition structure are intact.
Alternatively you can also bypass the disk utility application by using the Terminal to erase free space, which can be done with the following command:
sudo diskutil secureErase freespace 0 disk0s2
Note that while the device "disk0s2" is commonly the boot drive for systems with a single hard drive, this may be different for you system. Check the device by opening Disk Utility and getting information on your boot volume, and you should see the proper device name listed as "device identifier."

Disk Utility - Erase Free Space - Creating Temporary File Freeze

I used "Erase Free Space" with Disk Utility after trashing several files I no longer wanted on the hard drive or recovered. I used "Zero Out Deleted Files" option. It took over 12 hours before an error message appeared "Your start up disk is almost full. You need to make more space available on your start up disk by deleting files." I thought that was what I was doing. Disk Utility continued but got stuck on "Creating Temporary File." I force quit Disk Utility after several more hours. I had to manually shut down the computer because the restart command wouldn't work. It rebooted and appears to be OK. Evidently, this temporary file consumes significant amounts of disk space. This is an older iMac with 10.4.11 (18 GHz PowerPC G5) - I know, pretty old but I still have OS 9 on it and several files I need to extract before I trash it.
1. Should I do nothing? The iMac seems to be working fine.
2. How do I know if this Temporary File exists and consuming space? Spotlight doesn't find it. Where is it?
3. Is my start up disk in fact almost full? How would I know that?
Thanks!

Then I would not do any secure erasing. It's exceptionally time consuming and unnecessary. Before you take it in for recycling boot it from your OS X installer DVD. Do this:
Drive Partition and Format
1. Boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Apply button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Security button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
A one-pass Zero Data option is all that is required to prevent access to your erased files.

Kernel panic after "Erase Free Space" No end in sight

I did an "Erase Free Space" in disc utility. After seeing it through to about 90% complete, I went to bed. When I got up in the morning my fan was whirring away and I couldn't wake up the computer, so, using the power button, I shut it down, then turned it back on. Now I can't get into OS X (I see the message "You need to restart your computer..."), I can't boot from CD, and I can't boot in safe mode. All I can do is run the hardware test (after booting while holding "option" key), which tells me everything is fine. My only theory is that my hard disc was locked during the erase free space operation and since I have been unable to properly reboot the system, it can't be unlocked in order to boot from CD or open OX X. Any thoughts? I've been without my mac for a week now and am growing increasingly desperate. Thanks.
iMac G5 (with iSight) Power PC 2.1 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.8)

..."When I erased free space, instead of writing zeros to the free space, it essentiall wrote ones [...] I can start up in single-user mode and am contemplating formatting the drive and reinstalling OS X, if I can't just erase induvidual files."...
How exactly did you figure this out - what exactly are you seeing with respect to "individual files"? I thought the procedure with erasing free space used by OS X was basically to fill the free space with a big file, and securely deleting that file, but things may have changed. Your reference to writing ones and individual files is giving me an impression of many small files instead of a single large one - i.e. something that is different from what I would have expected.
I would have suggested looking for a file called EFTFile1.sparseimage or EFTfile2, or something like that while booted in single-user mode. It would have been in your user's "~/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems" folder, or in "/private/var/root/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems" and been as large as the free space was before starting the procedure. It should have been deleted automatically if the process had succeeded but if the process was interrupted, it would have been left on the drive taking up all of the space. Normally, you should be able to 'rm' it manually after mounting the drive as writable (with the usual warnings about executing commands in single-user mode), but since the situation may be different in this case, I don't know if this suggestion applies...

Erasing Free Space on boot drive

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