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I have installed macOS Sonoma on an external drive and set it as the boot drive because my internal Macintosh HD hard drive ran out of room. Can I erase that drive now? If I make enough room on my internal hard drive, perhaps I can install macOS Sonoma to that drive again and do other things to keep it from filling up, like setting certain files on an external hard drive. Is there anything else I can do?
Mac Pro, macOS 14.7
You could erase the internal drive but shouldn’t do it because it contains the recovery partition for your system with other useful tools for your computer by Apple.
If you choose to erase the internal drive you may run into other issues. Please be cautious because sometimes you could run into the issue with not being able to install a new(er) version of macOS on your machine. Be sure your system can launch Internet recovery and able to install the system if you choose to erase the internal drive.
madirmur59 wrote:
Yes. It's a Mac Pro. I was only able to get one with that little amount of storage. Here's the About This Mac. It looks like the best solution is to get more internal storage space. Do you think so? Is that a matter of me purchasing the internal drive and installing it myself? Do you think I can keep both the current internal drive and the new one I hopefully can purchase?
https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/c13c8982-b95a-4c85-af1b-3d9c301b1948
In that case, yes, you can install a larger hard drive inside.
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/mac-pro/2019
A Mac Pro is a large tower (desktop) computer, and yes can have its internal storage expanded.
I find it strange one of those big computers would only have 256GB of internal storage.
Are you perhaps referring to a MacBook Pro laptop? They are very different things.
If so, internal storage upgrades, will depend on the specific model / year.
The last MacBook Pro to support internal storage upgrades was the 2017 model without a Touch Bar.
Yes. It's a Mac Pro. I was only able to get one with that little amount of storage. Here's the About This Mac. It looks like the best solution is to get more internal storage space. Do you think so? Is that a matter of me purchasing the internal drive and installing it myself? Do you think I can keep both the current internal drive and the new one I hopefully can purchase?
I would not erase it. There are some things you can do. You can use Migration Assistant to transfer your files and preferences to the new external drive,. Then you may erase only those files. (After confirming that everything was fully transferred.)
It can be useful to have a bootable system on the internal drive, in case something happens to the external drive.
If you don't want to risk accidentally storing things on the internal drive (that you thought you were storing on the external startup drive), you can eject the internal drive in the Finder after booting from the external one.
I have started doing this. However, I notice in Disk Utility that the amount of disk storage used didn't change. It seems to me like the space used by the files on my internal drive is still allocated for use, even when the files have been deleted, so that I still can't use the freed-up space that was being used by those files I deleted. I've run into this problem before when I ran out of space on my internal drive and tried to free up space on it.
I'm unfortunate to only have 250 GB total storage space on my internal drive. I'm using a Mac Pro. I take it I am able to add internal storage on a Mac Pro. I am also using software that take up a lot of space, namely Xcode. I'm not sure what files I can delete that Xcode uses. I have done what I can with DevCleaner.app.
can I erase my only internal hard drive?
