OSX Leopard: Trash Always Full
Guess I am getting closer to running a well-usable version of Leopard, but I am not quite there yet: Since yesterday, my Trash turns out to be always shown as “full”:
(Yes, Papierkorb is the German word for “paper bin”).
So far, I haven’t been able to figure out why this happens — there’s nothing in there, really. I even “sudo rm -rf“-deleted the .Trash folder out of my home folder, but it didn’t help. OSX did automatically recreate it (empty!) but the dock icon won’t change.
For now, I guess I’ll have to live with an “overflowing” trash can — if you have any hints though what else I could do, a comment would be very much appreciated 
Update: It’s fixed! It was a filesystem corruption in the fat32 filesystem. I ran a chkdsk which converted the “undeletable” file into one that I was able to remove. Thanks for pointing me into the right direction, Jean Pierre and Greg!
Do you have any external drives connected? Did you check their
.Trashfolders?Hm! Maybe my bootcamp partition has one and for some obscure reason it’s broken? Lemme look
chronos:/Volumes/WINDOWS fred$ sudo rm -rf .Trashes ._.T*
Password:
rm: .Trashes/501/\004␀␀␀õ\001␀␀.õ\001␀: File name too long
rm: .Trashes/501: Directory not empty
rm: .Trashes: Directory not empty
–> ah-hah! Looks like I need to do a filesystem check on the windows partition.
Is there any file system (FAT) corruption?
Indeed, thanks! I ran a chkdsk and after that, I was able to remove a (strange) file off the Trash on the Bootcamp partition.
Hi,
I had the exact same issue with the exact same strange filename.
The disk repair solved it for me too (The 501 folder had been changed into a file).
I should just make clearer than the repair must be done running windows. The Apple “Disk Utility” doesn’t help.
Im having the same problem, I have the following file in my trash running Leopard 10.5.2:
␀␀␀õ␀␀.õ␀ 0k Alias
I ran a chkdsk on my FAT32 windows partition thru XP and it found errors, but did not allow me to fix the problem back on the MAC side. Any advise?
I had the same problem of Ari (comment 7) fixed erasing the fat32 partition…
thanks!
Thank you for helping me solve this problem.
I have a Mac pro running OS X.5.8 with four hard drives. The icon of the Trash-can, always shows it is full (in all four HD) but you double click on it there is actually nothing in them. I have tried to secure delete or used multiple Mac utilities to empty the trash without success.
I call apple support, and they explained to me this come from the BootCamp window partition and to demonstrate they asked me to unmount this partition with the disk utilities command, as soon as the window partition is unmounted the icon of the trash-can appears empty but if you remount this partition the icons of the four HD appear full again.
They told me there is no point to reinstall the systems OS X on the three HDs if the window partition remains, or it is useless to replace the Mac trash-can (showing being full) by a new empty one with the terminal and rm, cp, or rsync’s syntax as the new one will show itself full as soon as created.
Apparently, the Mac OS is reading into the Fat 32 partition of the Window XP and the way to get rid of this anomaly is to get rid of some abnormal files and folder on the Window XP side of the partition.
As per advised I traced them there are invisible on the C: drive and there are three of them:
a file folder: C: \ . trashes
and two files inside: C: \ . trashes\501\
: C: \ . trashes\ ._501
There is where my problems are I cannot get rid of them, when I ask the Window XP system to delete them an announcement always appears:
“Error Deleting File or Folder; cannot delete the file name, directory name, or volume label Syntax is incorrect”
Could you tell me the proper way to get rid of these files so I can restore my computer to a normal functioning.
I appreciate your help. I do not know how to run a chksdk on the window side. Any free utilities that could do the trick? Alex you said the disk repair which one? I have the same problem as Ari cannot get rid of these pesky files. Any ideas?