Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'Use OS 9 to delete huge files that OS X won't delete' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Use OS 9 to delete huge files that OS X won't delete
Authored by: Makosuke on Mar 16, '04 05:00:15PM

I'm with everybody else that if there was something preventing the file from being deleted, even via the command line, it certainly wasn't the file's size.

This, however, does remind me of the one and only time I simply could not delete a file any way but through booting in 9. In the early days of X I had basically done a drag-and-drop "clone" of an older drive to a newer one. In the process, somehow, one of the filesystem's "_____HFS_somethingorother" files got copied to another disk.

It was visible from OSX and although I could move it to the trash, it proved absolutely impossible to delete; I tried sudo, GUI tools, everything I could think of, all to no avail--'File could not be deleted' or something along those lines. I don't know if it had something to do with the odd null characters preceeding the filename, unusual permissions, or something else, but after about a week of leaving it in the trash and occasionally taking a shot at it, I gave up, booted into 9, and was able to delete it that way.

Weird, but I'm assuming that if I'd gotten more creative I could've gotten rid of it. At least, I hope, since I sure can't boot into OS9 any more.



[ Reply to This | # ]