ubuntu on VM will not boot - sda5 is 100%

[kalpana]

I woke up this morning to find my VM running ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS was frozen ... on reboot it failed with a load of errors.

after some digging around I see the sda5 is 100% ... I wonder if it filled up overnight. I have tried safemode and also an install disk ... I can see files and directories, but I cannot get write access to remove stuff.

I've tried various clean up scripts of old upgrade package files, but all fail with permission error (yes, I am using sudo).

How can I recover...without loosing my data ?

Is there a way to gain wrote access to clear the partition ?
Is there a way to add a new partition to give space and re-install without loosing data ?