Can't Empty Trash With Large Number of Files

I'm not sure I understand this bit:

If you're on Leopard 10.5.x, be sure you have the "action" or "gear" icon in your Finder's toolbar (Finder > View > Customize Toolbar). If there's no toolbar, click the lozenge at the upper-right of the Finder window's title bar. If the "gear" icon isn’t in the toolbar, selectView > Customize Toolbar from the menubar.

Then use the Time Machine "Star Wars" display: Enter Time Machine by clicking the Time Machine icon in your Dock or select the TM icon in your Menubar.

And this seems to defeat the whole purpose:

If you delete an entire backup, it will disappear from the Timeline and the "cascade" of Finder windows, but it will not actually delete the backup copy of any item that was present at the time of any remaining backup. Thus you may not gain much space. This is usually fairly quick

I'm trying to reclaim space on a volume that had a time machine backup, but that isn't needed anymore. I'm deleting it so I can get that 1GB+ of space back. Is there some "official" way you're supposed to delete these things where you get your hard drive space back?

Yeah, unfortunately I set this up on a volume that also serves as a very large file server, too.

In case anyone has this problem:

1) Open terminal window.

2) cd to the backupdb in the Trash folder on the external drive (i.e. 'cd /Volumes/<drive>/.Trashes/Backups.backupdb')

3) Run rm as sudo to delete the files you can delete, passing the -v param so you can actually watch progress (as opposed to watching 'Deleting -382,398 Files...' Do this like `sudo rm -rfv Backups.backupdb/`

4) Go away for a very long time until it completes.

5) After completion, there should still be a lot of garbage still floating around, but these are mostly folders with odd characters in the folder name. But if you click on Empty Trash as you normally would, the remaining files should delete fairly quickly.

Looking back on this, the real issue is the bug in how Finder counts items in the Trash. It's likely that if you just let the Empty Trash process procede, it will eventually finish. But once it goes into negative territory 99.999% of users are going to pull the plug.

The other benefit you get from just rm'ing the Trash is that the system doesn't waste a massive amount of time (incorrectly) tallying up the number of files that it's then going to delete anyway.

Initially I just pointed the Time Machine service at the large external drive. At some point I realized that wasn't the best idea and gave the TM backup its own partition. Of course, then I was left with a 500 GB defunct backup directory on the large external drive's partition.

No, I had a TM backup of my primary HD going to an external drive. I created a second partition on the external drive exclusively for TM. Both backups were to an external drive which was not the partition of the drive being backed up.