Trouble emptying trash

[kenglade]

When I direct the G5 Leopard to "empty trash" I get a window saying "preparing to empty trash" and a counter that zooms upward, but no trash emptying. I ask myself "how difficult can this be?" But I guess the answer is 'too difficult for me."

What the heck am I doing wrong?

 

[Eraserhead]

It might well just be taking a bit of time - be patient.

 

[Schtumple]

How much stuff have you got in the trash? Or how big are the files?

I've trashed an old System folder from a previous folder, 12,000 files, took about 15 minutes...

 

[kenglade]

How much stuff have you got in the trash? Or how big are the files?

I've trashed an old System folder from a previous folder, 12,000 files, took about 15 minutes...

Aaaarrrrggghhh! This keeps going around in circles. Can't open trash to see what's in there "because it's being emptied." Lt it run until it got up to 468K -- and I know there are not that many items in there. Then got error message saying trash couldn't be emptied because desktop was locked. tried to open desktop but it's grayed out.

Why is it so complicted to empty the trash?

 

[raziel777]

Reboot and try again.

 

[Fishtalk]

If all of the previous stuff dosen't work Try holding down 'alt' when you empty the trash.

 

[Schtumple]

Sounds like somethings corrupted in the System folder if you're getting that many errors...

Reboot, try to empty trash, if it takes forever, reboot, look in the trash, give it time, then drag some stuff out.

You've either got thousands of files in there, or something has corrupted.

Open the Disk Utility App, located in Applications > Utilities, and select your main drive and run disk permissions verify, then disk permissions repair, see if that helps.

 

[kenglade]

Sounds like somethings corrupted in the System folder if you're getting that many errors...

Reboot, try to empty trash, if it takes forever, reboot, look in the trash, give it time, then drag some stuff out.

You've either got thousands of files in there, or something has corrupted.

Open the Disk Utility App, located in Applications > Utilities, and select your main drive and run disk permissions verify, then disk permissions repair, see if that helps.

Was working through the options when i tried Fishtalk's suggestion to click Ctrl when initiating Empty Trash. That worked.

Alos went through Disk Utility and ran a check on the HD. It turned up negative, i.e., no problems.

Many thanks, guys.

 

[Schtumple]

Very strange! Glad it all worked out fine in the end though, guess it must've been a rouge file or something!

 

[iSamurai]

I also have this problem!

I have an external hard drive which i stripped it out of my old windows computer before i switched to mac, and i just wanted to clear out the 2GB+ "Windows" folder. So I plugged it in, dragged it to trash and hit delete, but it started counting the number of files in the directory... the macbook's fan started spinning and it just kept going forever. I pulled it out when it hit 10k+ files (i dunno how many files exist in the windows folder)... so i eventually copied my stuff onto another hard drive and formated that one then recopied the files back...

i tried deleting them on windows but it doesn't work either -- on XP and Vista -- coz there's just some problems with the "insuffiecient prviledges" or whatever that denied me from deleting the stupid folder...

 

[Schtumple]

Yeah there's easily that many files in Windows, think about it, you're deleting an entire sytem folder, it's not like you're deleting 5 files... For that one, give it time and be patient...