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sambarry

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 28, 2008
31
0
Hiya,

Im using a MacBook with OS X 10.6.2 and a Maxtor 1Tb External hdd.

I was running out of space on my External hdd, so decided to turn off time machine and delete all the backups and then do one latest backup and turn it off again, so i turned off time machine and deleted all the backups from the external hdd into the Trash.

I went to deleted the trash and after it prepared to delete some 48,000 files it came up with an error message saying:

"The operation can't be completed because an unexpected error occurred (error code -8003)."

So i researched this, tried a secure empty trash also held down the Option key and emptied the trash and also tried various different Terminal codes (I am nowhere at all competent with Terminal so i was probably doing it wrong).

I've also gone back into time machine and deleted any other backups from with time machine.

None of these have worked, and i have movies, music etc also on the external hdd so a re-format is out of the question, please help anyone!! :confused:
 
Can you just format the drive in disc utility (providing you have no data on the drive you want to keep)? That will empty the backup from the trash also and is much quicker. I just did this same thing this morning as I moved around about 500GB of video files and it tried to clean up and rebackup... quicker just to do a new backup.
 
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