A fix for strange unremovable characters in the trash

Dec 27, '07 07:30:01AM

Contributed by: heymike

I had a problem with strange characters not deleting in the Trash. They looked like asian characters, or zeros and slashes, something similar to: //00]|||00. Emptying the Trash deleted the files, but not the characters. If I did a Get Info, they would disappear, but come back if I deleted more files. I found out that it was caused by a corrupt file on a FAT32 Boot Camp partition in the C:.Trashes501 folder, and was causing this issue.

I repaired the problem by booting into Windows using Parallels, and running the Check Disk Utility for Windows hard drives. (Open My Computer, right click on the 'C' drive, and click properties. Click on the tools tab, then Check Now. Make sure that there is a check in the box that says "Automatically fix file system errors." Then you will be prompted to reboot. Check Disk will run on reboot.)

Check Disk found the error in the C:.Trashes501 folder and repaired it. Now my Trash in OS X does not have the strange characters when I empty it. I haven't tried it, but I would assume that if I just booted into Windows (through Bootcamp, or Parallels or VMWare Fusion) and deleted the .Trashes folder on the "C" drive, that it would work also. If you have an external drive formatted in FAT 32, you can plug it into a Windows machine, and you should be able to do the same thing.

Reinstalling Leopard, fdsk, and command line deleting of the Trash did not solve the problem, but this did.

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