Trouble with iMac Loading

Question

Hi, I was trying to copy a photo from iPhoto to the desktop.  I wasn't sure if I should drag it to the desktop and instead double-clicked on the photo, chose "Select All" and tried pasting it to the Desktop.  Suddenly it appeared to be trying to copy all the photos to the desktop and froze with the color wheel turning. I then powered off.  I've tried starting up holding down "option" and selecting the Mac Hard Drive and also "Option, Apple, P, R", but I get the same thing:  The top bar and desktop background are displayed and I can move the mouse but can't click on anything.  Sometimes the mouse arrow is just a mouse arrow and sometimes it is the spinning color wheel.  Hard drive icon won't appear.  Any ideas?  Thanks, Tim

Answer 1

To avoid using the windowing system, which may be dysfunctional, I would boot into safe mode, open up a Terminal.app from the utilties and do the following:
1. Enter the following command to see how much drive space you have left:
df -k
This will list all the mounted partitions. Some of them will be system partitions but you want to pay attention to the one that you "knew" as your own hard drive. On the right side it will be a column that says "Capicity". If this says something more than 90% you've probably discovered your problem.
2. If that is the problem (i.e. you've run out of disk space) you could enter the following sequence of commands to start deleting some of the files you copied to your desktop:
cd Desktop
ls -l|more
ls -l|more (that's all "el's" with a vertical bar to pipe it to the more command) will allow you to scroll through the list of files by hitting the space bar. The left hand column will have a format like drwxr-xr-x or -rw-r--r--. If it starts with "d" it's a directory (folder) so you probably shouldn't delete it, if it doesn't it's likely file. The next 2 columns will show the Unix user ID and group, the next is the file size, followed by the date, then the name of the file. I would think you would want to look for HUGE files like movies.
To delete the files, enter the following command
rm filename
For example, if you found a 1GB video named "BigMovie.mp4" then you would remove it with:
rm BigMovie.mp4
Keep in mind I have no idea if you copied out of iPhoto or extracted out of iPhoto (because I'm not sure specifically what you did). Extracting would mean it would take it out of iPhoto and put it on your Desktop. I doubt you did that or you wouldn't be running out of space.
If you are out of space you may need to sit there and keep doing this (removing files) until you free up enough space to get the thing working at least somewhat normally. Another thing that may help is this command:
sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage
The sleepimage file is the EXACT size of the memory in your system. It's a snapshot taken by the system of RAM contents when the unit goes to sleep. That should free up a few GB instantly, unless it was deleted by the system (which is possible) at which point it will report that there's "No such file or directory."
Keep in mind I'm assuming you've run out of drive space. That doesn't mean that's the problem. If possible, another option might be to try and boot it from another drive and clean up your system as needed.
For other problems, the site below has a fair number of various how to articles:
http://scsc-online.com
The other poster also posted some stuff from Mac World that may be useful.
Hope this helps.