Not the average "boots up in darwin" situation!

Okay here's the dig. When I log in I get the darwin screen with the white text. I knew I could do a reinstall and get it back to normal. HOWEVER, I cannot find my copy of tiger to save my life, so I went out and dropped $139 on leapord. I have a g4 powerbook and all the specs were in synch so it shouldn't be a problem and I can go back to my little productive life. Nope. When I attempted to install leapord I was informed that I needed 6 gigs of free space. Oh boy. How would I go about deleting files in the darwin enviorment, or is there a better option?

Have you got an external you can use to install Leopard on

That way you could boot from the Leopard CD, use disk utility to mac format the external and at least get the powerbook booting while you resque any files you need off the start-up drive

would anybody lend you a clean external?

That will be a life saver! I have an external drive but it's got a ton of files on it. I can dump them all on my other working mac I suppose. I take it the drive does need to be clean, it's becoming obvious as I type. I'm going to try that and I'll let you know how it went.
Thank you Thank you Thank you!

okay it took a week too deal with all of my data on the external drive.
But now I'm not able to format the drive. When I put the cd in and the installer pops up I'm hitting disk utility from the menu bar and attempting every option flying blind. I guess I need to know how to format my drive so I can pull this off.