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Emptying the Trash - STUCK!! Help!

kwajaln

kwajaln

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 18, 2004
368
0
CHICAGO!
trash.jpg
Rev B iMac G5 with 1.5 GB RAM. Never had a problem before. Now when I empty the trash it hangs on the above pic. I tried restarting and the same thing happens. The computer is also sluggish while the trash is *not* being emptied. Any suggestions??? :confused: Also, the blue that usually shows up in the progress bar NEVER shows up, it is STUCK as in the above pic.
 
kwajaln

kwajaln

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 18, 2004
368
0
CHICAGO!
Well I had been trying to secure empty trash but when I tried just regular empty it did so immediately. Strange. I wonder if I will have trouble the next time I try and secure empty the trash. Anyone else have similar trouble??
 
NYmacAttack

NYmacAttack

macrumors 6502
Dec 8, 2005
432
6
NY
ph0rce said:
why does it take so long to empty trash if you do it "secure"?
Click to expand...

Ia ssume because the OS is overwritting the files several times so they cannot be recovered. Thias would make your data securly deleted.
 
CANEHDN

CANEHDN

macrumors 6502a
Dec 12, 2005
855
0
Eagle Mountain, UT
NYmacAttack said:
Ia ssume because the OS is overwritting the files several times so they cannot be recovered. Thias would make your data securly deleted.
Click to expand...


You would be correct in assuming so. It does take a little longer to do a secure empty of the trash. It should take as long as he's saying though.
 
Sunrunner

Sunrunner

macrumors 6502a
Nov 27, 2003
600
2
CANEHDN said:
You would be correct in assuming so. It does take a little longer to do a secure empty of the trash. It should take as long as he's saying though.
Click to expand...


Use tinkertool to recover from that little problem. It does a nuclear trash empty if you want that will empty the sucker wether the finder wants to or not...
 
eRondeau

eRondeau

macrumors 65816
Mar 3, 2004
1,165
389
Canada's South Coast
CANEHDN said:
You would be correct in assuming so. It does take a little longer to do a secure empty of the trash. It should take as long as he's saying though.
Click to expand...

In my experience it takes a LOT longer to empty the trash securely, as it overwrites the contents several times. It takes several minutes for my iBook G4 to securely delete a few .mp3's (totalling maybe 50MB). I would expect if I was trying to delete files in the gigabyte range it would take hours. Plus it seems to take longer when dealing with multiple directories and dozens or hundreds of small-sized files, than one or two very large ones.

It is possible everything's working normally -- give it time. Do you hear a lot of HD activity???
 
SilentPanda

SilentPanda

Moderator emeritus
Oct 8, 2002
9,992
31
The Bamboo Forest
Secure delete takes an amount of time in proportion to the amount of data you are trying to securely delete. When you do a normal delete it simply removes (in terms that I understand) the file name from the big list of files and says, "Hey operating system... you can use this space again but I'm gonna leave the data there until you do". When you do a secure delete it not only deletes the file name from the big list of files but it also removes every bit of data and possibly even overwrites it several times.

Usually I only securely delete things dealing with my bank, not the latest game patch or dmg file I downloaded.
 
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