I have a windows 7 / Ubuntu 12.10 system that has been booting and running without problems for several months. Normally I run programs that generate a large amount of data and save it to a partition created by windows 7. This way the data is accessible in Windows and in Ubuntu, but yesterday I accidentally ran a program from the partition in which Ubuntu is installed and I think it has filled up all of that partition. I now cannot boot Ubuntu. When I boot in recovery mode and then from there to normal mode I get the messages:
starting save kernal messages [fail]
grub-editenv: error: cannot write to '/boot/grub/grubenv/new' : no space left on device
I can boot using a live-USB so dont think there are any hardware problems. The computer is not connected to a network so packages haven't been updated in a while.
Does anyone have any ideas on how I can delete some disk space from the same partition as my ubuntu installation? I've tried through windows but can't see the ubuntu partition and I've tried from the live-USB boot where the HDD is visible as 1.0 TB Volume however when I right click on it and select mount there is the error: adding read ACL for uid 999 to '/media/ubuntu' failed: Operation not supported.
I am able to start the HDD installation in recovery mode and drop to root shell prompt. There are some directories I can delete in my home folder from here but I get an error saying they are read only directories, even when using sudo rm -rf <directory>. Is it possible to delete directories this way?
Best Answer
Select recovery mode in Grub Menu and later choose "Root Shell". Run
mount -o remount,rw /to remount the root partition as read/write, then you should be able to delete files.