Mac OS X comes with many features, which can be beneficial to the user, but some of the features like printer drivers, additional language support, and other bundled software can take valuable disk space away from your Mac. Whether you have an older Mac with a smaller hard drive (or a new Mac), we’ll show you how to reinstall OS X and limit the installation size, giving you more room to grow in your digital world.
Before you begin with a reinstall of Mac OS X, you may want to ensure that you have a recent backup of your files to restore once the reinstall is complete.
To begin, you will need to boot off of either the disc that came with your Mac or a Mac OS X upgrade disc that you may have purchased separately. To begin the boot up process, insert the disc, then restart your Mac while holding down the option key until a menu appears that allows you to select between your hard drive and the install disc. Using the arrows on your keyboard, select the disc, then press enter. Your Mac will then boot into the Mac OS X installer.
For the installation process, we will be using a copy of Snow Leopard, but this same process can be used on many versions of Mac OS X; however, options may be located in different places.
Once this boot selection screen appears, you can stop pressing the option key.
After booting into the installer, click through the steps until you get to the section labeled “Select the disk where you want to install Mac OS X.” Select your drive, and then click on the Customize button in the lower, left hand corner of this window.
This new window will present you with several different installation options, including printer support, additional fonts, language translations, X11, Rosetta, and QuickTime 7. By default, some of the printer support drivers, additional fonts, language translations, and X11 will be selected. These, however, add up to an additional 1.31 GBs of (mostly) unnecessary files to be placed your Mac.
Leaner Snow Leopards usually run faster, and dropping almost a gig of files in one day certainly can help.
To install Mac OS X with only the bare essential system software, uncheck all of the options listed here. This will bring the total needed disk space down to a lean 3.83 GBs, giving you a little over 1 GB of additional storage for pictures, music, or applications from the Mac App Store.
A minimal installation should go a little faster as unnecessary components will be skipped, freeing your hard drive in the process.
After you choose the options you want to have installed, continue through the installation just as you would with any other install.
In today’s modern digital world, music, videos, pictures, and applications can really take a toll on your hard drive, especially if you are a digital pack rat. If you have a smaller drive (or you are currently maxing out your existing drive), you may want to consider an upgrade. Drives today are relatively inexpensive for the amount of storage you get, plus on MacBook Pros, MacBooks, and Mac Pros, the hard drives are accessible enough that many people can perform this simple upgrade themselves.
If you are unable to upgrade your Mac’s hard drive, you may want to even consider an external drive to hold your music, videos, and applications. Doing this will free up your Mac’s internal drive for important system files, and in some cases can even make booting and application load times much faster.
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bradzilla
March 10, 2011 at 9:54am
Jaygyver-
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my question. I do appreciate it.
Jaygyver
March 02, 2011 at 10:13pm
bradzilla-
if your still around or for any one else, this may be the problem.Your HD needs extra room to expand the updates and stuff. The Updates are -compressed- just like anything else you would download. If you are using 15 Gigs and the updates show 500mb or 1 Gig then the update doesn't have room to expand the extra files. Your looking at a 1/4 to a 1/2 -larger- file size, or more, AFTER it expands. When the "Software Updates" are done THEN it will erase the extra files it doesn't use.
Do a "get info" on the next file you download or use,(dmg, zip, etc,) before AND after you expand it. Then add the two together and that's the total size it takes up before you even used it.
Try to "whittle" down the files you have on the Flash drive and it "Should" work. That goes for any drive also, internal or external.
If you are having problems with running out of room for updates then you may have issues with the slowness of the computer also, spinning curser, etc, (unless your maxed out on ram) because the OS uses the HD as a "virtual Ram" disk for some stuff. The going rate seems to be having an extra 10 to 20 percent of extra room on a boot drive.
bradzilla
February 24, 2011 at 10:45am
I have my OS (Snow Leopard) on a 16 GB flash drive but have been unable to update it. Software update says there is not enough room to complete the install. Is there a way to work around this in the update process? Thanks.
brycew
February 23, 2011 at 5:43am
Why would you leave out Quicktime? I understand all the other extras, but Quicktime seems pretty essential to me.
