Trash from other systems appearing in Mavericks trash

[danqi]

I have performed a clean install of Mavericks on a new empty hard drive. My old hard drive with two 10.6.8 Snow Leopard partitions is also still installed in my Mac Pro, because I am planning on manually moving stuff over.

Here’s the weird thing: In the Mavericks trash a bunch of files appeared that should not be there. They seem to be a subset of those in the trash of one of the Snow Leopard systems (the one that will remain in use for software compatibility reasons). How can this be and should I worry about it?

 

[Dark Dragoon]

There are several locations where the trash folder will be located, such as one for each users home folder as well as one on each external drive. OS X will detect these other trash folders (with the exception of the ones located in other users home folders) and will display their contents in the Trash.

So this means for example:-
a) I have some files on an external drive.
b) I delete some of those files, which are then moved into the hidden trash folder on the external drive. But I don't empty the trash.
c) I take the external drive and plug it into a second Mac.
d) The files I deleted on the external drive will appear in the Trash of the second Mac.

So this isn't a problem, it's just the way OS X handles deleting files and the trash.

 

[danqi]

The weird thing is, it is not behaving like that though. I have no external drives connected, but 3 system drives. Let's call them A, B, and C:

When booting from drive A (10.6.8) it shows nothing in the trash (empty).

When booting from drive B (10.6.8) there are a bunch of files in the trash.

When booting from drive C (10.9.1, clean install) there are some of the files from drive B in the trash.

This can't be right. Obviously, I am not really worried about the files in the trash. But I am worried that something deeper is wrong.

 

[Dark Dragoon]

Sorry, when I say external drive in my example, it can be any drive or partition which OS X has access to, and to which spotlight has indexed.

With regards to some of the files from drive B appearing when booted from drive C, this may be down to where the files were when they were deleted (or whether they were deleted when booted into OS X on another drive). If they were in the users home folder on drive B then they may not appear when booted into drive C. The files which do appear may be located in the trash located at the root of the drive.

As for why drive A doesn't see any of these, that I'm not sure about. Does it have the other drives mounted?

Personally I doubt that there is anything actually wrong.

You can test this. If you go into Disk Utility select the partitions for the other drives and then click on the unmount button, the files in the trash from those drives will disappear as they will no longer be accessible.

 

[danqi]

Ok, thanks for the help!