Disk full; Terminal in Recovery mode won’t delete files; boot kernel panics

In spite this post is old, I decided to leave my solution here to help community with one more approach.

note: I wrote a medium with more description.

In my case, I din't have that extra partition available so, in recovery mode:

1. Run the terminal

   

2. run diskutil list

3. Find the identifier of "VM" volume. In the case of the previous image is "disk1s5". You'll probably have "disk2s4"

4. delete the volume VM:

diskutil apfs deleteVolume disk1s5

(replace the disk1s5 for your VM identifier)

5. You are now able to remove files on "/Volumes/Macintosh HD"

I hope it helps someone.

I am so lucky. Posting this to hopefully help others.

I had partitioned my APFS volume, and was able to delete the non-boot partition. This gave the boot volume enough space, and I'm back up. I'll clean up the drive and restore that volume.

I found a post on a ZFS forum that suggested that these new filesystems require some disk space to perform any disk operation. If you have 0% left, you're out of luck.

All other tricks to remove the file, to overwrite it with null data, failed.

dd if=/dev/null of=/path/to/large/file failed.

true |> /path/to/large/file (or something similar, I forget the exact command) failed.

Everything failed, except booting in to Recovery mode and, without mounting any drives first, deleting the extra APFS partition.

Lesson: keep a ~100MB dummy partition (or just quota your main drive so it can't take up 100% of the physical disk) as your get-out-of-jail card.

Edit: I actually mean that I had multiple APFS volumes on my boot partition, and that I deleted one of those volumes. Old language dies hard.