so my OS partition got full during a update and i didnt notice. reboot couple days later and now i cant boot at all. was getting acpi errors and the pc would boot to the log in screen but after that nothing. googling is getting me too many false positives. what do?
os is linux mint i think 17? 18?
tl:DR
boot partition was full as was home apparently. boot into live usb eventually after 3 different linux installs refused to boot(maybe cause xeon?) and made some space and it;s alive!
when you boot into grub press e on the default entry and then add init=/bin/bash to the kernel arguments. remount the root partition as rw with mount -o remount,rw / and clear up some space
I would chroot in off a liveCD or USB and clear stuff out that way.
holding e does nothing for me. when i boot off of the usb it wont boot. no idea why. show up as a option in bios and starts to boot but then i get a _ on a black screen and nothing happens.
ok got command line what do? cant boot in
Make some space. Look for packages/files you no longer need and delete them. Chances are your package manager has accumulated lots of old packages in a cache directory.
i use gui for everything and only use command line when needed and almost always something i googled then copy pasted. no idea how to do that @pFtpr
cd <path> changes the current directory to <path>
ls lists all files in the current directory
rm <file> deletes <file>
These commands should suffice for your purposes.
apt-get stores downloaded packages in /var/cache/apt/archives so your best bet is to navigate there and get rid of some. Go to that directory first:
cd /var/cache/apt/archives
Then use the rm command to delete some you don’t need. You can use rm -r ./* if you are certain you don’t need any files in the current directory.
There’s plenty of shell tutorials available if you need anything.
using gnu grub command line when not booted. got a error “cant find command cd” also got “cant fin command mount” so im pretty limited here. wont boot off of usb or disk =/
goign to download a different version of linux and try booting off of that usb. whatever problem is preventing usb boot might not effect every version of linux?
eidt boot into linux mint 18.2 and it wont boot off usb. novemou somethign error.
boot into linux mint 18 and input not supported! good thing i have 3 monitors, oh wait they are all the same model and all not supported. shiiiit
17.3 acpi probe failed input not supported
Probably “nouveau”, which is the open source driver for Nvidia graphics cards.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/nouveau
Once you clear some space, you may still need to install the Nvidia driver to get everything working. The open source driver for Nvidia cards breaks pretty frequently in my personal experience, so if you’re not doing anything crazy with the card and still want to use it without having to fiddle with x server every so often, I recommend installing the current supported nvidia package.
sudo apt-get install nvidia-384
I believe 384 is the correct version number assuming you have a 64-bit build, but you may want to get someone else to double check, as I’m not as familiar with the version numbers of Nvidia.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html
can we get a picture or video of what your boot screen looks like?
You mean your “boot partition”, so just remove some old kernels, if that is the actual issue, as it could be a number of things, but filling up your boot partition on deb based distros is fairly common if you’re not auto cleaning.
ok i booted into ubuntu 17 live usb. was able to log into root and delete some old shit.
there is now space in the boot partition but it still wont boot.
"
MDM could not write to you authorization file. this mean that you are out of disk space of that your home directory could not be opened for writing. in any case, it is not possible to log in. please contact your system admin
"
deleted some stuff from home folder and
IT BOOTED!
Welcome to linux where you can actually recover a broken install 
Good to hear you managed to get it fixed though