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Emptying trash of external HD

F

FrenchPB

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 15, 2005
389
0
Hi guys,

I have an external harddrive on which I put most of my files before changing the HD on my powerbook. Now that everything is back to normal, I wanted to clean my external HD and put files in the trash. However, when I wanted to empty it, I couldn't because files in 'Applications>Windows Media Player>Windows Media Player' are locked. The problem is that it's a package and I can't unlock the files within that package...

I tried iEmpty but it tells me it's empty but it's not. I guess that's because it's the external HD...

Do you know what I could do to empty the trash?

Thanks for your help
 
FrenchPB said:
Option key? Is that the one with the apple on it?
Click to expand...
Ah... a European... :)

No, it's the the one marked "alt" on most European keyboards.

It's quite easy to get confused about the different names:

Apple key = command (cmd) key
Alt key = option key
Ctrl key = ...well, Ctrl key ;)
 
By the way, do you know what's the best way to empty the trash? The secured way basically overwrites on the existing data, whereas the other one just clean the index in some way...

But is there a recommended way to empty the trash (new Mac user, not used to have that option :D )
 
I rarely use anything but the ordinary Empty Trash (usually by right-/ctrl-clicking the trash icon in the dock), but on occasions when a file is locked I use the alt/option key and sometimes when Trash will not empty because some object is in use (even if it's not, happens e.g. when you've watched some imaged using Finders built in slideshow) Secure Empty Trash will take care of that.

For the most stubborn files a restart might be required and I've also used "sudo rm -r" in Terminal to get rid of a particular difficult folder once. :)

I never have sensitive enough data to use Secure Empty Trash for anything else, it also takes quite a while if there's many and/or heavy files in Trash.

Ordinary Empty Trash (shortcut: shift-cmd-backspace) should be fine for ordinary day-to-day cleaning... ;)
 
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