Trash crash

Mike Adams

Mike Adams

Registered
I am using a 867 MHz G$ with 512 MB RAM and running 10.2.8
My trash has started to crash the machine whenever I try to empty it. Does anyone have suggestions for a fix?

Thanks
 
Interesting.

I had a 17inch imac, 800mhz, with 10.2.6 and experienced the same problem. For me, it was an old copy of Quicken 2003 (after an upgrade).

Nothing I tried seemed to work, so I stuck the file away and forgot about it. (ok, ok, so I hide from my problems).

Now that I'm older and braver (and running 10.3.2), can you tell me how to discard something from the command line?

Thanks!
lbj
 
It seems to be the contents of a single folder that are the promary culprits. It is a folder with some 5 GB of old data that I have backed up and now want to remove from the hard drive. Test show that any file from this folder causes the gray screen to appear when I invoke 'empty trash'.

I have not tried using the command line approach since I am both ignorant and paranoid about getting into Root
 
Do you have another partition i.e. external drive? If so, try to move the folder from the Trash to that partition or drive. Then put it back again in the Trash and try to delete it again. This is what worked succesfully for me when I encountered similar problems.
 
I tried a CMD-move on one of the files. As soon as it tried to delete the original I got the gray screen.
 
Open the terminal and type:

cd ~/.Trash
<hit return>

sudo rm -rf

put a space after the f and drag the item you want deleted to the terminal so that its path is automatically entered, then press return

give it your admin password and hit return

This is actually more typing than is strictly necessary, but Changing Directory to the trash helps make certain you won't remove anything that is outside of that directory. You could just type "rm -rf *" to remove everything inside of the directory, but again being specific helps avoid mistakes.
 
Thanks for the step-by-step on using the terminal. Unfortunately it lead to the same result: the moment I hit return after my password I got the gray screen.
 
Mike

Do you have more than one partition on your machine? Is OS 9 installed?
 
Thanks Bob, that helped (cured) my problem. I had used other partitions, even tried target mode via firewire from my ibook, but any attempts to delete the file crashed the system.

Your terminal trash worked great. Thanks. Sorry Mike, good luck.
 
My thanks to everyone who sent suggestions. I was directed to a program called Obliter8. After putting my problem folder inside a blank folder, I dropped it onto the icon. When I looked inside just one file remained! While I have not tried to trash it, I assume this is the one that caused all the problems. At least I have regained the 5+GB of disk space that the rest of the files were using.
 
You wouldn't have happened to have Norton System Utilities installed would you have? I had the same problem with some files when Norton was installed, uninstalling it fixed the problem, and it's never been installed since.

Brian
 
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