Comments on: OSX Leopard: Trash Always Full

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 20:11:28 +0000

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?

By: Happytobehappywth

Happytobehappywth — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 10:18:46 +0000

I had the same problem of Ari (comment 7) fixed erasing the fat32 partition…
thanks!

By: Ari

Ari — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 22:34:52 +0000

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?

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 21:26:57 +0000

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.

By: Fred

Fred — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 20:13:51 +0000

Indeed, thanks! I ran a chkdsk and after that, I was able to remove a (strange) file off the Trash on the Bootcamp partition.

By: greg

greg — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 19:35:59 +0000

Is there any file system (FAT) corruption?

By: Fred

Fred — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 11:49:17 +0000

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.

By: Fred

Fred — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 11:48:08 +0000

Hm! Maybe my bootcamp partition has one and for some obscure reason it’s broken? Lemme look

By: Jean Pierre

Jean Pierre — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 11:45:56 +0000

Do you have any external drives connected? Did you check their .Trash folders?