External hard drive and '.Trashes' issue?

D

dubstylee

Registered
Hey,

I recently bought a LaCie 160gb firewire drive to use with my iBook. I partitioned the drive into two, one for music, other for backup. Hard drive is formatted as FAT32 (for PC/Mac interoperability).

My issue is: I currently have about 32 gb of music on a ~95 gig partition. I have been adding/deleting quite a bit of music off my library on iTunes when I convert bitrates or find something I don't need anymore. Whenever I delete it off my iTunes list, it asks if I would like to keep the file or move to trash, and I always move it to the trash.

Problem is, my hard drive thinks it has 52 gb of music on it. I know there is a hidden folder called '.Trashes'. I imagine that is where the extra 20 gb is residing.

How can I erase this folder (I can't see it on my iBook, but if i hook the HD up to a PC its visible)? Or am I totally missing the mark here?
 
When you connect the drive and it is mounted on your desktop, if there is anything in the trash on that drive, then your trash can icon in the Dock will appear full. Simply empty the trash to recover the space.
 
tried that already.

i have 31.68 gigs of music on the HD (no other files), but it says that i have used 51.93 gigs.

I am wondering where that 20 gb disapeared to.
 
You may want to wipe the iPod and start over -- I find that my iPod/iTunes behave a little "dumb" when I change a song file... it seems like iTunes doesn't remove it from the iPod, just copy over the new file.

I'm thinking that iTunes doesn't delete the actual song files off of the iPod if you remove them from the iTunes Library, it just updates the iPod's music library file and calls it a day.

The amount of space used on my iPod is about 4 gigs higher than the amount of music reported in iTunes as well as the Finder (no photos, minimal contacts, just music on the iPod). I'll be wiping and reloading soon as well... it may fix it!
 
just to clarify--this is an external hd, not an ipod. but of course much of the functionality is the same.

wiping it out is not a reasonable option at this time. i have 31gb of music on the external, but only 20 gb available on my iBook HD, so I do not have anywhere to store the music if i reformatted.

another issue with reformatting: it was a PITA to get my drive partitioned as FAT32, I had to use a PC with PartitionMagic to do that, I do not have software on the iBook to partition a FAT32 (Disk Utility can't partition FAT32, and HFS+ isn't an option right now as I need cross-platform compatibility).

I think i may try looking for a PC to hook it up to, and see if there is in fact files in the .Trashes folder.
 
Disk Utility can partition and format for FAT32, you have to change to the "PC Partition Scheme" in options.

You said that you formatted the disk for PC interoperability, try connecting it up to a PC and see what it shows up like on that. Are there any other folders? Contents in the .trashes folder? etc?
 
dubstylee said:
where do i find this option? i am running panther.
Click to expand...

In Disk Utility, click on the disk you want to partition, click the partition tab. At the bottom of the tab you have split, delete, options buttons. Click options. If you have not options button then I guess this was added in Tiger - I never used partitioning when I had Panther.
 
figured it out--

so it ends up that i had about 6000 doubles of songs. i went through my external, and most folders in the iTunes directory would have song xxxxx.mp3 and song xxxxx 1.mp3.

i popped up finder, searched for ' 1.mp3' and ' 1.m4a' and trashed 'em. unfortunately, iTunes was linked to the ' 1.mp3' files, so i lost all my ratings and playcounts at the same time. its not too big of a deal, i lost them about a month before, so i hadn't built up too many ratings yet.

thanks for the help!
 
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