Mac Mini Not booting due to hard disk being full

Hello All,
I have a Mini and has worked well for the past 12 months, last week i upgraded to the OSX Lion which also went very smoothly. However yesterday i had a message on my screen stating the my startup disk was full and i needed to make space. finding this a little odd as I have a TB external hard drive that everything goes to.
the mini frose during the deletion process after leaving for approx an hour i attempted to reboot. from this point i have only been able to access the disk utility through the DVD that came with the mini I have done a disk check and repair, also check permission all are ok exept for only having 49mb of hd space left.
I cant access safe mode as this will not boot either (tried to load for 8 hours) re install will also not work due to the amount of hd space available
has anyone got any ideas how i can clean the hard disk without formatting as ideally i would like to know what is causing the problem.
like a not very bright thing i left the time machine turned off so this isnt an option either??

Ok, basically it would involve the following
Boot from the DVD
Launch the Terminal.app probably from a Utilities menu which also lists Disk Utility
In Terminal you would need to type cd /Users/accountname/.Trash followed by pressing the return key
Then you would type ls -l and again press return
It would then list what is in the trash for that user account. If it begins with a D it is a folder, otherwise it is likely a file. The big number before the data would give an idea of the size of the item.
When you have found the one you want to delete (remember you cannot undo this) you would type the following to delete a file rm filename and then press return again.
The do ls -l again to see if the file has gone.
If you want to delete a folder that is in the trash then the command would be rm -r foldername and then again press return. Using rm -r is a particularly dangerous command if you do it in the wrong place or the wrong way you could delete everything on the hard disk.
Normally in single user mode (which you said was not working) you have to type some other commands beforehand to allow modifying the contents of the hard disk. I have not tried this via the DVD so I do not know if the same applied. If it does it is likely to refuse to delete the file and you should come back to me and we can work out the process.

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Message Edited by AHK on 07-02-2009 07:16 AM
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