Finder Help please!

[CheCiara]

Hi there. I was moving a large number of files (~30000) to trash yesterday. Stupidly I dragged rather than right clicking to delete. In the process Finder crashed. It won't relaunch regardless of what I do. I went into terminal and navigated to desktop where a lot of those files were (I saw this when I used ls). But when I try to remove them it doesn't work. It says file or directory not found. I copy and paste the name of the file so the name is correct. What can I do? It seems to me the large number of files on the desktop is causing finder to crash and not relaunch but then it says that the files are not there. Firefox is working and when I look at desktop by browsing to it with my email I can't see those files either. I am guily of now backing up in some time too so am very reluctant to wipe everything. Please help-I ahve some very important work on there.

 

[Frankydan100]

Have you simply re-started your computer, that normally helps in alot of occasions?

 

[CheCiara]

Yes several times to no avail-the computer restarts but without finder. My desktop is empty and all I have is firefox.

 

[Frankydan100]

Sorry its abit out of my league this. Hmmm is your system backed up with time machine? You could try booting from the snow leopard installation disc?

Maybe the best thing would be to take it into apple and have someone at the genius bar look at it.

 

[CheCiara]

Thank you. I will call in today. In the meantime-all help is most gratefully recieved!

 

[-aggie-]

Try repairing disk permissions from disk utility.

 

[Hellhammer]

Have you tried rebooting and then deleting them?

 

[blondepianist]

If you have the OS X install disk available, you could boot to it and repair the disk with Disk Utility. If you don't have the disk, you can also boot to single-user mode (cmd-s) and do fsck. That would probably at least clean up the files you can't remove.