External Hard Drive: Can't Empty Trash

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Level 1

7 points

External Hard Drive: Can't Empty Trash

Hello guy,

I have looked on every forums but could not find the solution for emptying trash of my external hard drive, which is formatted exfat

I get the following message:

The operation can’t be completed because you don’t have permission to access some of the items.

As i said I have tried to empty the trash using terminal, holding option key down, etc, etc. with no success.

I hope that some of you can help me.

Many thanks

MacBook Air, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1), yosemite

Posted on Apr 11, 2015 5:59 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

parhamj

Level 1

9 points

May 6, 2015 10:09 PM in response to puzzled_me

I was having a very similar issue. My external drive is partitioned: time machine partition (HFS) and other partition (FAT). When I attempt to "secure empty trash" (or just regular empty trash) I get a message indicating that I do not have sufficient privileges/permissions, etc. I was able to determine that the files causing the issue were files that I had deleted from the external drive. I unhid all files and discovered that the files I thought I had deleted from the external drive were actually still there (buried in the .Trash folder) and I was unable to delete that folder or the files hidden within.

So, I unmounted the drive and connected it to my PC. From the PC I deleted the ".Trash" (or was it ".Trashes"?) folder. Then unmounted from PC and reconnected to Mac. Now the files are gone and my trash is not bloated with files as it was previously.

I realize this is a 'workaround' that may not be available to you (and everyone), but if you have access to a PC this may solve your issue.

If there is a straightforward way to accomplish this within the Mac OS X environment, please do tell/explain!!

Hope this helps!

_____________________

MacBook Pro 12,1 – Yosemite (10.10.3)

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Answer 2

Mar 10, 2016 9:11 AM in response to parhamj

After I deleted old Time Machine backups from my external drive, my Trash still held 5 old CrashPlan backups, some with zero bytes. By pressing OPT when I emptied the Trash from the Finder menu, I was able to empty 4 out of 5. But I couldn't get rid of that last one -- until I saw your post. After ejecting my external drive, my Trash showed empty. After I plugged the external drive back in, the Trash showed that old file.

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