Trash won't empty

You mean to erase the entire Mac!! It's new and I just spent days setting it up for my wife and it was her old Time Machine drive I was deleting.

tbirdvet, I'll give it a try, but won't hold my breath. I've been using Macs forever and I'm a retired developer and geek...no where have I ever read to NOT do this. Obviously, it's something I shouldn't have done, but if it's such a critical issue, perhaps Apple might want to add a warning about it somewhere in the Time Machine documentation. I'll let you know what happens, but using secure empty trash takes so long anyway, I'm sure for 250 GB of data it will take a week or so...if it even works.

Linc, let me explain in more detail.

1. The TM backup volume was being used by an old iMac.

2. I bought her a new iMac and "manually" reconfigured everything...not by using the TM backup.

3. Everything was fine until I plugged the TM drive in so I could delete the files. I got the tutorial asking if I wanted to use that volume for a TM backup...I said NO...then I trashed all the folders on the TM drive.

This brings me to where I am now...all the old TM backup files are in Trash on the newly configured iMac and won't delete. Nor can they be moved back to the old TM drive, they can only be "copied" to the drive and then still remain in Trash.

tbirdvet, that was the first thing I tried...never worked. It got to some point, maybe 150K files, then just sat there doing noting for hours so I gave up.

den.thed, I've tried holding down "Alt+Option" along with holding down "Shift+Option+Command" and neither worked.

After a lot of Google searching, I found the answer. I went back to a normal "Delete Trash" action and let the trash identify almost 800K files before it started counting down the deletions. I thought I'd finally figured this out until it hit zero and then started counting negatiely...which went on for several hundred thousand files while I was still searching.

I tried ejecting the "empty" TM drive but of course OS X wouldn't let me, saying it was still in use. So if it was still in use I figured the only thing that could be "in use" were symlinks to what used to be on the drive. So I searched on how to "force eject" a drive that wouldn't eject...found that quickly, went to Disk Utility and ran the force quit procedures. It made me affirm twice that I truly wanted to do this and lose all the data on the drive (which was already gone)...and when I did so, the trash was empty.

I appreciate all the comments, and even though I found the solution myself, looking back at the thread, Linc Davis actually said to erase the drive as the first answer, even though the drive didn't have anything on it and at that time was not plugged in. So I'm awarding him the solution.