It said that the disk was going to be wiped. I didn't proceed and followed the step 2. I then tried to reinstall Mojave, but when I selected the Macbook Disk it said that it was going to be wiped clean. I restarted with Command R and entered the terminal, deleted as many big files as I could, having almost 30Gb free, but didn't solve the problem (in that moment I backed up all the files I knew wheren't on any time machine backups and tried to continue). I restarted, the installations restarted and got stuck on the same screen. Options given to me: restart or shutdown.
#HOW TO FREE UP SPACE ON MAC BOOK PRO INSTALL#
I started the app to install MacOs Catalina, it all seemed right unitl I saw a message like the original post. My problem, apparently, was different somewhat. All my files were intact, even though I had explicitly moved out/deleted about 30G of files while trying to debug the installation issue. For example, if I started my installation at 4pm, I decided to pick up the recovery from 2pm (even though there was a backup available from 4 pm). I picked one of them that felt fairly far away from the moment I had began installing this OS. When I clicked this option, I saw about 5 backups populate from today itself. Your macbook will prompt you to pick a disk where the time machines are stored, and I picked "Macintosh HD". Now, as I mentioned before, I thought I hadn't got this turned on, but I guess it was turned on by default by the OS.
This time when the options pull up, choose "Restore from Time Machine Backup". Reboot and go into recovery mode again (press cmd + r during reboot). Even if you're convinced you don't have one, it doesn't hurt to give this a shot.
Try to reinstall Mojave (this won't wipe your disk) - I wanted to return my macbook to as original a condition as possible, and I figured attempting to install Mojave was the best way to do it.I'm not sure if step 1 was necessary, but since I did this en route to fixing the loop of death, I'll list it here for you to consider. I was facing the same issue and was on the verge of reformatting my macbook.