Hello guys,



I am new here and am currently experiencing a bad problem with my laptop. Not sure if this belongs here, but I could not find any help here using the search engine, so I decided to create a new thread.

I am using elementary OS on a thinkpad X230 which has been running fine without any troubles. However recently I discovered I had accidentally deleted a file a while ago (.json) and hoped to be able to recover it using photorec. I created a new folder in my home directory, which I intended to use for the recovered files. I let the program run and since it said to take over an hour for it to finish, left the laptop running while I went out. When I came back home I discovered that the process had stalled at some point, because there was too little space left on the SSD.

And this is the problem now. I cannot do anything at all. Not even login to my account anymore. If I attempt to run a process or program, even delete or copy a file from the command line it will say

-bash: cannot create temp file for here-document: No space left on device

df -h lets me know, that the main partition is 100% full. The recovered files must have been more than 400GB.

Is there anybody who can help me with this matter? I have no idea what to do at this point... And I cannot afford to reinstall the system and loose the files on the machine.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
B.

Boot a live distro (CD/USB), and from inside there you can mount your SSD and delete the necessary files.

The issue has been fixed! Thread can be closed!

Thank you

Please share what was done to solve your issues. That way someone who searches LQ will find your thread will a know solution for your particular problem.

1 members found this post helpful.

Basically I did what suicidaleggroll suggested. Luckily I had an old live distro on a USB stick and was able to mount the drive. Then I saved critical files onto an external harddrive to make sure they are safe. After that I just deleted some larger files and rebooted the system. Everything back to normal now and running like before. I couldn't recover the above mentioned file though, might have to turn to a professional in that case.

You should never use the same disk you are trying to recover files on as a target for a recovery tool. There is always the possibility you will over-write the very section of disk that contains the deleted file.
Having filled the disk, that possibility will be almost certainly 100%.