Ran into precisely this problem with a friend's Ventura Mini last year. The solution was to boot into recovery and mount the Data partition using Disk Utility.

Ran into precisely this problem with a friend's Ventura Mini last year. The solution was to boot into recovery and mount the Data partition using Disk Utility. I don't recall where the Data partition gets mounted but I think it is: "/System/Volumes/Macintosh HD - Data" Or just Data, since Sonoma. It will be clear from Disk Utility. Then close Disk Utility and go into Terminal and run rm on a big unseeded file. You can find one using: find <data-mnt> -size +100m Using rm will fail. Unmount the Data partition and run fsck on it. This completes the deletion. From there enough more space can be freed in recovery to have a healthy buffer, then reboot normally and finish cleaning. It seems that when the volume gets so full that rm doesn't work anymore the filesystem also gets corrupted. HTH and that I didn't forget anything.