After installing Leopard, I relaunched Finder. Now when I go to Secure Empty Trash it hangs with 4 untrashed items. Is there another way, eg from the command line, I can empty these items? (Empty Trash works normally)
If I do use the command line, what command do I use?
For my information, where-abouts in the file system, is the Trash located?
I can't see the items that won't securely delete in the Finder, only their "phantoms selves". By that I mean, the Trash is empty but when I add a file and then use Secure Empty Trash I "see" them as the 6 items that won't delete.
Brief background of setup:
I have 3 hard drive: (1) The main drive named "Mac HD", (2) hard drive/hub named LaCie Drive (LCD) connected to my Mac Mini, (3) a drive named "Time Machine Backup Drive" (TMBD). Before I installed Leopard, I installed Tiger on LaCie Drive as the scanner still uses Classic and Classic won't work with Leopard. Leopard was installed on Mac HD. Each OS as the one admin user.
Each time Secure Empty Trash hangs, I have to relaunch Finder, which kills the process. I repeatedly click on "Cancel" but my clicks don't register.
Things I've tried since
1) I ejected both external drives (LaCie Drive and TMBD) and duplicated a small file and (a) Empty Trash and (b) Secure Empty Trash. Both went smoothly and finished (Note: as said initially I don't have a problem with "Empty Trash" only "Secure Empty Trash" which doesn't finish.
I mounted LaCie Drive and repeated the above, duplicate a small file then Empty Trash and Secure Empty Trash. Secure Empty Trash hanged with 4 items still to be deleted. (see #3 below)
I ejected LaCie Drive and mounted TMBD (only Mac HD and TMBD were mounted) and repeated my test. Empty Trash worked as before, Secure Empty Trash hanged with 2 items still to be deleted.
I mounted both drives and repeated my test. It went as before, Secure Empty Trash hanged with 6 items still to be deleted.
2) Using Terminal I've peaked into the .Trash and .Trashes folder on each drive.
- Mac HD has one user account "~/.Trash" and the system "/.Trashes"
- LaCie Drive has the same as above (I forgot about the User account on this drive, I only checked the system Trash (/.Trashes).
- TMBD only has /.Trashes
each folder is has a subfolder "501" and that is empty.
3) Started up in Tiger off LaCie Drive and Securely Emptied Trash. This went smoothly and I could see and name the files before I deleted them.
4) I've booted from the Leopard Install DVD and repaired each disk. I also erased the free space on Mac HD (Note: erasing free space is the same as securely emptying the trash)
5) I Repaired Permissions twice, and cancelled it both times. My thinking was that this function only matches up to the Install receipts, and doesn't check the user data for permission irregularity.
6) I left Secure Empty Trash overnight and in the morning it still didn't finish, ie it hanged.
7) Today I erased the free space on LaCie Drive which took 7 hours (LCD has 150Gb free space)
8) Rechecked #1.
With just Mac HD, SET listed 3 items, the one I just added plus two additional "phantom" ones.
With Mac HD & LaCie Drive mounted, SET hangs with 4 items still to be deleted, ie the same as before. Holding the Option key down it "deleted" an additional item -- there were only 3 items yet to be deleted, but it didn't finish. Repeating this without the Option key being held, it went back to before -- hanged with 4 items to be deleted.
With Mac HD and TMBD, SET hangs with 4 items still to be deleted, before it only had 2 items still to be deleted -- not 4. Holding the Option key down did nothing.
With all drives mounted and holding down Option, I was expecting it to "delete" an addition item, but this didn't happen, it hanged with 6 items still to be deleted.
After this test, I restarted the computer into Leopard, as all that relaunching of the Finder I'm guessing couldn't be "good".
9) Rechecked #2.
Mac HD: ~/.Trash folder was empty. The "/.Trashes" folder was empty.
LaCie Disk: ~/.Trash folder doesn't exist. The ".Trashes" folder had a "501" folder which was empty.
Time Machine Backup Drive: The ".Trashes" folder had a "501" folder which was empty. Checked the first two Time Machine backups and there were no ".Trashes" folders in the /User/Admin folders.
10) Rechecked #3. Furthermore: Upon restart the Trash was empty. I created a simple text file and used Empty Trash and Secure Empty Trash and it worked normally. Also I put a 500Mb file in the Trash and Secure Empty Trash-ed it. Hiccup: The Trash mini-window didn't appear in the Desktop. I placed another file 10Mb and Secure(-ly) Empty Trashed it also. Cycling through the windows revealed the Trash mini-window. Bottom line: despite the hiccup, SET worked as expected.
Conclusion: Initially when I relaunched Finder when the SEP process was running, it must have corrupted a certain file/record which the OS uses to "know" which files to delete. Even though the OS knows that the Trash is empty, it still thinks that SET has 6 files to delete securely, but those files don't exist (cf. command line tests on Trash folders). So SET is trying to delete files that don't exist but this process still believes that they do—but I think it is wrong.
Also, I'm guessing that a file/record of the files is corrupted, I have no way of knowing if this conclusion is valid, it is just a guess.
I'm having the same problem, and am surprised to see such a simple thing not working in a final release of OS X. Also, there doesn't seem to be any point to there being a Securely Delete Trash option in the Finder preferences. When selected, emptying the trash does
not securely empty the trash, but just empties it, so why is it there??
To view the hidden contents of the trash, you would have to enable the display of hidden files and folders in the Finder. You can do this via Terminal or with several third-party utilities. However, I think that if the Finder won't securely empty the trash properly, neither would any alternative means. As posted by many others already, relaunching the Finder and emptying the trash works.
I think I will let my trash accumulate until the first Leopard update, and try again. Otherwise it's back to good old
Trash X. Hmm, but is it compatible with Leopard yet... ?
I'm thinking my problem is the result of damage to the Directory.
Since my last post above, I've moved the com.apple.finder.plist preference file, thinking that it could have a listing of the items to be Trashed, ie a record. No so, the problem still persists.
Two things have been suggested to me from a friend, 1) perform an archive and restore on the drives with Tiger and Leopard (2) use DiskWarrior and run that.
I don't currently have DiskWarrior, so I'm more inclined to do the Archive & Restore.
Good to know I'm not the only one with this issue, and thanks for mentioning Trash X.
Barry Clarke1 wrote:
I don't currently have DiskWarrior, so I'm more inclined to do the Archive & Restore.
I zeroed my boot drive immediately before doing an Erase and Install of Leopard and encountered this problem from the get-go. The first time around, I also had troubles ejecting a mounted disk image, and decided to just scrap the whole installation and repeat the zeroing of the drive and installing again. This has not changed the problematic behavior in any way, so I would think that you'd probably be spinning your wheels with the Archive & Restore.
Since my last post just a while ago, I ran DiskWarrior 4 from CD and performed both the Rebuild and Repair (exact wording??) routines, and the problem persists. From the rebuild operation, I had two files with damaged attributes and one folder with damaged attributes, and from the Repair operation, error (-9997) detected while verifying/repairing permissions on the volume...
So, like so many others, my freshly installed system suffers from the Secure Empty Trash problem as well as the problem concerning the inability to repair permissions.
Back to the trusty XP machine until this OS works properly :-/
Same problem here with secure empty trash. Says 4 items to delete but never finishes deleting them. Btw, I installed Leopard using the Erase and Install option.
I'm having this issue as well. As an experiment I left it running overnight to secure delete 2 tiny Word documents. In 10 hours it never did finish the task.
I'm sure I speak for many of us when I say that I've/we've been using Secure Empty Trash ever since it first introduced in a previous OS X release years ago, so I'm/we're well used to waiting for the trash to be shredded this way. The problem is simply that the trash will NOT be securely deleted anymore, no matter how long one waits.
In my case, upon installing Leopard, the first thing I wanted to do was set my System Preferences to my liking, then download the newest Leopard-compatible version of OmniWeb (5.6). Once I mounted the disk image and dragged the application to the Applications folder, I ejected the disk image and moved it to the trash. This is not a large file, and therefore should not take hours or overnight to securely delete it. Also, there is nothing wrong with the file from OmniGroup, as I had downloaded and installed the same version of OmniWeb under Tiger before Leopard was released, and securely deleted the disk image with no problems.
I'm experiencing the same problem. To solve it I wasted a lot of time holding the line with the AppleCare Assistance and I tried to do the following:
1. To erase some files stored in the user's preferences
2. To create a new account with the transfer of all the documents from the old one to the new one
3. To erase the free space from Disk Utility Application
4. To decode the filevault and to encrypt it again
but with no results. The secure empty trash hangs on with the final 6, 5 or 4 items.
The only way to restore the problem is to reopen finder from the Apple Menu.
Hope to receive the bug fixing from Apple soon!
Happens to me too. I use the function almost exclusively- Ieven set the Finder to automatically Secure Empty Trash. So I'm hoping there'll be a fix. Soon.
tzongk wrote:
I even set the Finder to automatically Secure Empty Trash.
Actually, I think that this new Finder preference is quite misleading and ill-defined. It doesn't, as far as I can tell, allow the Trash to be securely deleted automatically or by default, but instead simply adds an +Empty Securely+ button to the window that opens when you open the Trash from the Dock.
