Folder on external drives reappears after deleting

I have a folder called "System" on an external drive that I delete, but immediately upon deleting it, it reappears in the same place. How can I determine what process is re-creating this folder so I can stop it?

Sunds like you are trying to delete the operating system folder. If you want to wipe whatever the external drive is, go into Disk Utility and choose Erase and format Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and that will wpe everything off the drive.

But there shouldn't be an operating system folder there since there is no OS on the external drive. It's just a storage drive.

ebsseattle said:

But there shouldn't be an operating system folder there since there is no OS on the external drive. It's just a storage drive.

Click to expand...

Then how did a folder named "System" get on the external drive? Are you sure you didn't accidentally copy your Macintosh HD "System" folder to the external drive? Open the folder and tell us what's in it.

I have no idea how it got there.

The folder chain is:

System-->Library-->Caches-->com.apple.kext.caches-->Startup

Nothing inside the Startup folder.

Did you use that drive at one time to boot from? In other words, as a bootable copy of OS X? In any event, if that external drive is not bootable and you're only using it for storage, go ahead and format it as Harry advised. Make sure you copy any data from it that you wish to save before formatting.