Deleting folders in my Desktop using terminal in recovery mode Unfortunately, today I wanted to update my operating system from Catalina to Big Sur. I had more than the approx. 12Gb required to installed (if I remember correctly I had around 21Gb available). Later, when only 2 minutes were left to finish the installation I had ´An error occurred preparing the software update - Big Sur´. This ended up in a loop after rebooting as described here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252038616
The problem is that apparently, the installation required way more than those 12G, so the only way I can think of getting out of this is to start in recovery mode, and use the terminal app to delete folders that I have in my desktop. Once this is done I hope the installation of Big Sur will work.
I am now in the terminal (bash 3.2) but I don´t know how to get to my desktop. After I type cd /Volumes I can see via ls that there are the files .fseventsd , Macintosh HD - Data , Macintosh HD and macOS Base System.
I assume that the files and folders in my desktop are in Macintosh HD - Data but I can´t access to it. I tried cd Macintosh HD - Data without result, the prompt out is ´cd: Macintosh: No such file or directory´.
I don´t know how to access the desktop and delete files from there.
First, back out of Terminal and open Disk Utility. Use that to mount the data volume. Once it's mounted, you can go back to the Terminal and cd /Volumes and ls. You should be able to cd into that directory and find Users/your username/Desktop from there.