external drive -- can't remove trash..

[maya90]

I have a very conventional WD external hard drive... I have removed all my files & dir b/c am handing it over to another person.. but discovered all files and dirs I removed are still there, in dir .Trashes... inside this .Trashes dir is a dir '501', all removed dirs and files are there.. but I can't remove them!!

inside dir .Trashes, I tried:

rm -r 501

and get this prompt:

override rwxrwxrwx  <myUserName>/staff uchg for 501/books/review.html?

it's doing this for every single file in there.. why is it doing this? don't even know where dir "staff" is (there's no such dir, either in my computer or in the HD)... and whether I do 'y' or 'n' (or do nothing and just press return) it does not remove the files...

pls help.. this is ridiculous.. why is it so hard to remove files from an external drive?

thank you.....

 

[AxoNeuron]

Can't you use Disk Utility to just reformat the drive?

 

[maya90]

Can't you use Disk Utility to just reformat the drive?

wasn't sure about remformatting drive, am giving it to a friend, so they use it on their windows machine, not sure if was going to run into probs if it was formatted..... but well... finally succeeded with this command:

sudo rm -rf -r 501


('501' being the dir I wanted removed...)

thank you....

 

[maya90]

actually, should I format it if I'm handing it to someone else for use in their windows machine?

won't have any probs then in windows with it? it will start working normally in windows w/o me having to do anything? (dl a drive or whatever?)

thank you.....

 

[AxoNeuron]

I would format it as FAT32 in disk utility. Your friend can then format it to NTFS in Windows.

 

[maya90]

don't know what FAT32 or NTFS is...

but thank you!!