[SOLVED] External Drive, Cannot Empty Trash.

[strongclad]

I was doing some spring cleaning on my external hard drive and the usb cord was accidently unplugged before unmounting it. I was deleting files and emptying the trash just fine until it was unplugged. Now there are 17 files/folders in the Trash and I can't empty it. When the hard drive is disconnected from my laptop, the files disappear from the Trash as expected, and when I plug it back into the laptop they show up again. I just can't empty the trash any more, nor can I delete any other files from the drive.

I'm using Mint 13 (Cinnamon) on a Lenovo B560. The external drive is a Hitachi SimpleDrive III, 2 TB, with two partitions. Both partitions are HFS+ (my prior computer was a PowerBook G4).

Any ideas on how to fix would be appreciated. Thanks.

EDIT:

Connecting the external drive to my PowerBook G4 seems to have fixed everything. I booted the G4, connected the drive, and used Disk Utility to check it for Errors. None were found. I'm guessing that Mac OS X (10.4) has some sort of housekeeping routine that automatically repaired the drive when I plugged it in. I was able to reconnect the drive to my Lenovo and was able to delete my files.

[catweazel]

The drive may need to be fscked.

If you don't already have them installed, you will need hfsprogs.

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install hfsprogs
apropos fsck

That last command will list all the man entries for fsck. Amongst them will be the command you need to fsck an HFS drive. Simply do a man <fsck type> to get the help text.

[strongclad]

Thanks for your reply.

I followed your directions and this is what I got:

Code: Select all

david@david-Lenovo-B560 ~ $ fsck.hfsplus /media/FREE\ SPACE
** /media/FREE SPACE (NO WRITE)
Device is not a block device

I can't seem to find a description of "block device" that would give me a sufficient understanding of what was going wrong. I understand (NO WRITE) just fine, and that would give me reason to believe that no changes could be made to the drive because "read only" privileges are available. Seems weird that this could happen since everything was working fine before, but then again I'm not too knowledgeable of Linux underpinnings yet.

I had write privilege problems when using this drive for the first time with Linux, and had hfsprogs installed to overcome this. A little reading led me to fix the problem by turning off Journaling from within Disk Utility and changing permissions on Mac OS X. All was well after that. Now...not so much.