Broke My Debian System

So it appears my Debian "Wheezy" desktop is broken. Came home last night and my gf attempted to look at FB using the desktop. She mentioned it was being very slow and the Seamonkey browser kept crashing. So I rebooted thinking: flush the memory, things will return to normal. Nope.

Upon rebooting, I noticed a warning message indicating:

root file system has insufficient space

OK. That is a new one. I proceed to finish the boot process and expect Debian to load but nothing happened. So I rebooted into Debian Safe-Mode (which allows for command line maintenance) and entered the df command (disk free). df showed my main partition where all my files are stored is 100% full. Not sure how that happened since I have not downloaded any huge files. I entered du (disk usage) and found my home directory was 29 Gb. (The hard disk is only 37 Gb). Various other directories had 1-4 Gb of data. Very strange because my install of Debian is relatively fresh with a reformatted disk.

So I concluded that I needed to delete some files and the best way to do that would be to load a live CD and poke around the bloated partition. I inserted Precise Puppy (Puppy Linux) into the CD-rom drive and rebooted. Puppy loaded OK but I immediately noticed that only one of the two hard disk partitions were mounted. Upon scanning my hard disk with Gparted, I realized the volume that I need to access uses LUKS full encryption and I cannot mount it to delete some files. Bad news.

Here things got worse. I turned to the Internet for some help. I found a discussion about mounting encrypted volumes from command line at Ask Ubuntu. I found some information that looked promising and entered the following command:

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb5 sde5_crypt

The result of which gave me:

device-mapper: reload ioctl failed: No such file or directory

Great!  I don't know what that means.

I did find a very good short blog post on this subject by Alvin Abad,

How to Recover a LUKS Encrypted Disk, but I still end up with the device-mapper ioctl failed error. 

Unfortunately, the PC hardware has got to be around 10 years old and various components are failing (power supply, audio card) so I think it is about time to build a new PC. Too bad because I still  have a lot of work to do tonight.