How to delete files off of my hard drive if my computer won't boot up.

So, my hard drive is filled to capacity on my macbook air and the computer flashes a Message stating "Your startup disk is full." and from there it can't even finish booting up. Is there a way to delete files off the hard drive by using an external startup drive? Terminal?  I have an external WD Passport hard drive that I've partitioned with one partition being a startup disk of with OS X 10.6.8.   At this point the people at the store I bought it are only offering to wipe the hard drive and reinstall the operating system.  I'd hate to lose all my pics and movies.  Any suggestions?

If you have another Mac, you can plug it into your Mac,  boot from that and try to access your internal hard drive from there and start dragging things off/emptying the trash. That is the only thing I can think of. If that does not work, you will have to erase.
Once you get this taken care of, remember: you should never fill your hard drive completely; the OS needs room to function properly and that would be an absolute minimum of 10 - 15 GB (more is much better) and, you should always have a current backup of everything. So, buy an external hard drive so you can make a backup as soon as you get the OS reinstalled.

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