mac osx lion - file size is less than 1mb- not booting

We have an iMac with wireless keyboard and mouse running OSX Lion. Looks like the disk capacity is full and shows only 16 KB free space in Macintosh HD. We are able to reach till the login screen but after login we get a light gray filled image and mouse pointer active over it.

i tried recovery mode and disk utility to repair disk. still not working.

Can someone please help.


Try deleting some files in single user mode.

  • Hold command-S on startup
  • fsck -fy; mount -uw /
  • rm -r /Users/username/.Trash/, rm /var/vm/sleepimage, or delete some other files
  • reboot