Emptying the Trash - STUCK!! Help!

[kwajaln]

Rev B iMac G5 with 1.5 GB RAM. Never had a problem before. Now when I empty the trash it hangs on the above pic. I tried restarting and the same thing happens. The computer is also sluggish while the trash is *not* being emptied. Any suggestions??? Also, the blue that usually shows up in the progress bar NEVER shows up, it is STUCK as in the above pic.

 

[grapes911]

Open up the terminal and try this command:
rm -rf ~/.Trash/*

 

[Gokhan]

k

try a program called delete it brillant life saver delete's anything even if osx does not

 

[mad jew]

Delete It costs US$6 whereas Force Delete is free. As with any of these apps (and Terminal), take extreme caution.

 

[kwajaln]

Well I had been trying to secure empty trash but when I tried just regular empty it did so immediately. Strange. I wonder if I will have trouble the next time I try and secure empty the trash. Anyone else have similar trouble??

 

[ph0rce]

why does it take so long to empty trash if you do it "secure"?

 

[NYmacAttack]

why does it take so long to empty trash if you do it "secure"?

Ia ssume because the OS is overwritting the files several times so they cannot be recovered. Thias would make your data securly deleted.

 

[CANEHDN]

Ia ssume because the OS is overwritting the files several times so they cannot be recovered. Thias would make your data securly deleted.

You would be correct in assuming so. It does take a little longer to do a secure empty of the trash. It should take as long as he's saying though.

 

[Sunrunner]

You would be correct in assuming so. It does take a little longer to do a secure empty of the trash. It should take as long as he's saying though.

Use tinkertool to recover from that little problem. It does a nuclear trash empty if you want that will empty the sucker wether the finder wants to or not...

 

[eRondeau]

You would be correct in assuming so. It does take a little longer to do a secure empty of the trash. It should take as long as he's saying though.

In my experience it takes a LOT longer to empty the trash securely, as it overwrites the contents several times. It takes several minutes for my iBook G4 to securely delete a few .mp3's (totalling maybe 50MB). I would expect if I was trying to delete files in the gigabyte range it would take hours. Plus it seems to take longer when dealing with multiple directories and dozens or hundreds of small-sized files, than one or two very large ones.

It is possible everything's working normally -- give it time. Do you hear a lot of HD activity???

 

[SilentPanda]

Secure delete takes an amount of time in proportion to the amount of data you are trying to securely delete. When you do a normal delete it simply removes (in terms that I understand) the file name from the big list of files and says, "Hey operating system... you can use this space again but I'm gonna leave the data there until you do". When you do a secure delete it not only deletes the file name from the big list of files but it also removes every bit of data and possibly even overwrites it several times.

Usually I only securely delete things dealing with my bank, not the latest game patch or dmg file I downloaded.