Full disk, locked up MacBook recovery?

[Dela Boy]

I recently used ccleaner on my MacBook. The general clean up stuff worked well. But then I had to go the extra mile and perform an erase empty disk. While it was performing this it used up the empty 80gb+ left on my hard drive and stopped some other apps working. So I cancelled the opperation. The disk space was still taken, so I went to restart. Now after a full disk warning and logging in I'm getting nothing but the purple star scape and my mouse icon. How do I get finder running or possibly ccleaner running to clear some disk space and get everything working properly?
I changed harddrives at the start of the year. Was considering installing the old harddrive starting windows with that. Mean while crack open my seagate external, install this harddrive and tidy it up through USB. Would this work? Is there an easier way? The MacBook is my only computer. And I don't know anyone else daft enough to own a "they're great when they work" mac.

 

[Dela Boy]

First I better apologise for my "why aren't you windows" rant.
And then explain how simple it was to plug my old harddrive into my seagate externals dock, hold alt down while the mac came on. Boot up the mac through the usb's harddrive and then access my internal harddrive through the external desk top. I used Daisy Disk to clear the space, but see no reason not to use finder. After clearing 60gb, restarted, works fine again.

I was lucky having an old harddrive to boot from. I guess the smart thing for us all to do would be have a second partian to boot up from on the internal drive. I mean I didn't even try to use time machine as my last save was months ago and would have lost alsorts.

Ok big backing up session for me now after that scare

 

[GGJstudios]

I recently used ccleaner on my MacBook.

Not a great idea. You don't need "cleaner" or "maintenance" apps to keep your Mac running well, and some of these apps can do more harm than good. Some remove files/folders or unused languages or architectures, which does nothing more than free up some drive space, with the risk of deleting something important in the process.

These apps will not make your Mac run faster or more efficiently, since having stuff stored on a drive does not impact performance, unless you're running out of drive space. Some of these apps delete caches, which can hurt performance, rather than help it, since more system resources are used and performance suffers while each cache is being rebuilt.

Many of these tasks should only be done selectively to troubleshoot specific problems, not en masse as routine maintenance.

Mac OS X does a good job of taking care of itself, without the need for 3rd party software. Among other things, it has its own maintenance scripts that run silently in the background on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, without user intervention.

Five Mac maintenance myths​