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.
22 Answers
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
If you get into trouble with your installed Linux ( Or windows ) OS, you can use the non persistent USB Ubuntu live installer to fix what you need to fix.
However, the OS partition can't be encrypted for a direct hard disk mount.
It is even possible to install Linux on to a USB in order to get a portable OS.
