Cannot Empty Trash!

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

ya – deleting time machine backups doesn’t work so good… :-/

if possible, just format the original drive that you are using for backups via the disk utility – that should get rid of the backup in the trash. it’s what i did after i got stuck as well with a large file in the trash (it didn’t dawn on me that you couldn’t just delete those files either).

sitruc

[Joseph Wilkins]

so i’ve since renamed and formatted the drive it came from, so now its just orphaned in the trash can…

any other ideas?

[Curtis Thompson]

hmm – have you also turned off time machine? and i assume you re-tried deleting it once the drive was formatted?

[André Engelhardt]

Type:

rm -rf ~/.Trash/*

in Terminal, or holding down the Option key while emptying does a force empty trash too.

—
Audio Engineer, Sound Designer
Video- and Photographer
http://www.andreengelhardt.net

[Curtis Thompson]

personally, i did su to root and did the trash removal but at the time it didn’t work. i was in a smidge of a hurry so a quick format was next anyway as i had to get rid of the rest…

i must not have done the force option, but i swore i did. logically, root can remove all…

i am still fairly confident that it won’t work if you don’t remove from the shell as root, though.

[Joseph Wilkins]

so I called and they said the only way to do it was to reformat my drive… which finally fixed it

thanks guys

[Curtis Thompson]

reformat your main drive? apple told you that?

(or reformat the backup drive? i’d suggested that as it worked for me but you said that it didn’t for you?)