Accidentally Threw Hard Drive Icon in Trash

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Level 1

8 points

Accidentally Threw Hard Drive Icon in Trash

So now you've seen it all! Somehow I managed to accidentally drag and drop my internal HD icon into the trash and instead of ejecting the drive, Tiger created a neat little folder in the trash with 24,000 items in it.

Crapola.

The computer is running just fine but I'm wondering if anyone can tell me whether or not it is ok for me to override all the security messages I'm getting and in fact erase the contents of the trash without completely wiping my system.

Anyone?

Thanks,

Max

PowerPC Desktop, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Sep 5, 2008 3:20 PM

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Answer 1

Klaus1

Level 9

52,879 points

Sep 5, 2008 3:44 PM in response to Ecological

No!

Just drag it out again!

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Answer 2

Sep 5, 2008 4:41 PM in response to Ecological

Hi and Welcome to Apple Discussions...

I say blame this on the heat. I'm across the bay in Alameda where we broke yet another temp record at 96 today.

As Klaus says, just drag it right outta the trash and don't look back. I've done so much worse.

Seriously, it would be a good idea at this point to run Disk Utility (Appliations/Utilities) and Repair Disk Permissions.

Carolyn 🙂 <--- praying for fog

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Answer 3

Ecological Author

Level 1

8 points

Sep 5, 2008 4:56 PM in response to Ecological

Thanks for the quick feedback gang. So I neglected to mention that if I drag the folder back onto the desktop it actually stars gearing up to copy said 24,000 items to the desktop. I've let it sit there for 20 minutes without any progress on the indicator. I'm about ready to give up the ghost and backup the drive before I restore the OS.

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Answer 4

Ed Hanna

Level 4

1,240 points

Sep 6, 2008 8:00 AM in response to Ecological

If everything is running fine, as you say, then a wipe and reinstall would seem to be overkill, when all that's wrong is… what? If the computer needed that icon there, then it would be unusable, don't you think? What if the poor 'puter, unable to eject itself, or to unbolt the drive, as instructed, merely did the next-best thing and 'copied' itself into the Trash?

Do not empty the Trash while you sort this out, but it seems this has not destroyed your ability to operate, so I think you'd be best to examine the situation further w/o taking drastic action.

For instance: I assume your Finder preference was set to display hard drives on the desktop (or you wouldn't have had anything to Trash). Is it doing so now, and if it is, what do you see when you double-click that icon? What isn't there, that you think should be there? If it isn't displayed, what happens when you toggle that Finder preference? What do you get when you do a Find on a filename like Library that the OS created? Or on your home folder? You can set Finder's new windows to open Computer, what do you see when you do?

If the computer needed that icon, it would have crashed, or not allowed you to do what you did, in fact displaying that icon would not be a user-defined preference (as it wasn't on OS9).

It may be that you have some work to do, but before doing the whole brain-transplant of a re-install, I think you should put a bit more time into diagnosis. The 'problem' may be smaller than you think.

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Answer 5

BDAqua

Level 10

250,259 points

Sep 6, 2008 10:46 AM in response to Ed Hanna

Very good points Ed, we really don't know what is really in the Trash... seems more info is in order.

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Answer 6

Ecological Author

Level 1

8 points

Sep 26, 2008 4:29 PM in response to Ecological

Well I was unsuccessful in trying to figure out how to delete the Macintosh HD folder in my trash, which might not seem like such a big problem until you realize that a locked item residing there means you cannot empty your trash, ever.

My solution was to simply create a new user and migrate items from my desktop and home folder to the new user.

tada.

Thanks for all the support, hope this helps someone else.

Max

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