# Trash on external harddrive



## Lusk (Jul 20, 2012)

I know this problem is on the internet loads of places but I can't seem to find a solution, maybe you guys can help.
(I copied the question below from another thread here which didn't have any usefull responses)

I am experiencing a problem on my external HD . I'm a MacBook Pro user but I also have Windows 7 on BootCamp. The external is WD Elements FAT32.

When I plug in my external while on my Mac partition, the trash can automatically fills up with old files that I put in there a long time ago. When I press "Empty" it makes the usual trash crumpling sound then closes the Trash window as normal but the same files are still in there. If I attempt to take the file out of Trash (normally you do this by right clicking and pressing "Put Back" but that option is NOT there) it begins to *copy* the file to the destination (so the file is still in the Trash even if I "move" it out). Once I eject the HD, the files disappear from the Trash. When I plug it in while on my Windows 7 partition, there is nothing in the trash. 

I've tried using Terminal commands to force it to delete the files in the Trash but the files persist. Any suggestions?

Thank you.


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## janikPilot (Nov 26, 2010)

That's a very odd problem. it sounds like a weird combination of permissions. If nobody else has a better solution, I would back up everything on the HDD then reformat it for mac (Mac OS Extended Journaled).


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## tompatrick (Apr 19, 2010)

It might be possible that your hard drive is not responding because of lots of junk files present on the HDD. My suggestion is to try Stellar Speedup Mac software to remove the files from trash which permanently deletes the data from the hard drive so it won't be back in trash again.


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