External hard drive issue

[KOMNausicaa]

Hi guys,

happy to be on the forum

I am having a problem with an external hard drive. It's full, and when being plugged in, fills the Mac recycle bin with items it wants to delete. (probably from it's own recycle bin?) When I try to empty the trash, the Macbook crashes.
My guess is that there is not enough space left on the external hard drive to complete the operation. (only 4MB of 250GB left).

Is there any way to delete items on the external hard drive without using the trash bin on the Mac, or is there any other solution?

Many thanks in advance -

 

[GGJstudios]

Did you try holding down the Option key while emptying the trash?

You can't empty the Trash or move a file to the Trash
Solving Trash Problems

 

[KOMNausicaa]

Thanks for the answer, but that made the Mac crash again. I now solved the issue by plugging the external HD into a PC, and cleaning the recycle bin there.

 

[toriann0608]

External Hard Drive Not Reading in Macbook

Hi, I have a hitachi xl500 external hard drive. I've been using it on my mac and it's worked just fine. my boyfriend plugged it in to use it with his pc netbook and it didn't recognize it (because its formatted to use with my mac we realized). now when i plug it in my macbook, the computer doesn't recognize that anything is plugged in the usb. i can tell the external hard drive is on and running, but i'm afraid it somehow got unformatted for a mac - what can i do to make it work again?!