Can't boot because of Full Disc

I am running Ubuntu 20.10 LTS on a dual boot with Windows 10.

The other day I had the wonderful idea to run a data recovery utility... Long story short is I filled up my hard drive and now Ubuntu won't start.

• When booting into Ubuntu, I get some error akin to "Community MySQL won't start". Researching that alluded to issues about not enough disk space, and since I recently filled up my hard drive, I'm guessing MySql doesn't start due to a full disk.

• Booting into windows, I cannot give my Linux partition more space.

• I can boot into GRUB, although I can't find much use for it. Doing the "Clean" option doesn't seem to do anything. I have two kernels available - 5-8.53 and 5-8.55.

• My last idea before posting this question is to create a boot disk. I created a boot disk for 20.10, but that doesn't seem to work... Do I need to use a different distro than what I have currently?

• I believe I do not have a boot partition. This is my first linux box, and i didn't know what a boot partition was until 10 minutes ago.

I just need to delete one folder from my Linux partition. What is the easiest way to do that without booting into the OS? Please and thank you.

Solution 1:

I solved it!!

First, I forgot I needed to press F10 (or F-12 on some machines) to access the USB Boot thing.

Once I figured out how to correctly boot from USB, I was able to figure out how to delete files by following the instructions here.

The only caveat to those instructions is to prefix the fdisk and rm commands with sudo