Help deleting files off of seagate external hard drive

Tejicano · Nov 17, 2011

I have a seagate free agent goflex drive that is 2TB and I am having major issues trying to delete files off of it. I have tons of music that I'm trying to consolidate and there are three folders that I'm trying to delete. When I put them in the trash and click on "empty"...they start to delete and right around the 6,000th file I get the gray screen of death and am forced to restart. When I go and check the external drive, nothing has been removed yet. I have about 80GB of duplicated music that I'm trying to get rid of and dont know how to locate the corrupted file if there is one. I'm just trying to do a forced delete of these massive folders! Any suggestions??

I started to delete about 20 sub folders at a time but now the trash shows all of those files stuck in the trash taking up "zero kb." My trash is looking like a nightmare

bobtomay · Nov 17, 2011

I'd do what you're doing - delete in smaller numbers at a time and then empty the trash before you delete more. You must empty the trash while the external is attached or they've not been deleted.

Tejicano · Nov 17, 2011

I can do that but then my trash folder keeps all of these ghost files sitting in the trash. They just say "zero kb." Do you know how to get rid of those?

bobtomay · Nov 17, 2011

Don't have a clue - never seen it. What format is the external drive? And have you tried re-booting?

Tejicano · Nov 17, 2011

It says it's Windows NT Filesystem. I bought this drive after coming back from afghanistan because my old external only worked with PCs. My wife bought a mac and I had some IT guys transfer everything from my old external to this one. Once it was all transferred over I consolidated all my music to this new drive and in the process realized that I had copied over an entire folder twice with a slight change in the folder name so it duplicated. I have been trying to sync it with itunes but it only goes about halfway (a few hours) and then quits. So I figured step 1 is to get rid of this duplicated folder and then I'll get to the itunes issue.

So yeah...I really have two problems but I'm hoping to just get one fixed at least. Might just take this thing to Best Buy and pay 200 dollars for them to tell me they cant fix it and my whole external is corrupted

bobtomay · Nov 17, 2011

You're not going to be able to delete files from a NTFS drive without 3rd party help. OS X can read but not write to NTFS natively. Am pretty sure it can't actually delete anything from a NTFS partition either. I use and recommend Paragon's NTFS for Mac. It'll add not only the write ability, but pretty much full NTFS support incl'g partitioning and formatting NTFS from Disk Utility.

Tejicano · Nov 17, 2011

bobtomay,

first of all...thank you for taking the time to help me out with this and if at any point you decide to "cut slingload" aka...ditch my issue...completely understandable. I can both read and write to the external drive. The reason I bought it was because it had that ability....so I might be wrong but I dont think that is really the issue. I was hoping there was some nice little command I might be able to type into the terminal window to just wipe out that entire folder but I'm not sure something like that exists. I tried this:

sudo rm -r

and then dragged the folder over to execute but after typing the password and hitting enter...I got a lot of errors and then the gray screen popped up again.

You think I should just take the hard drive to a mac place to get looked at? Or is there a better way to force the deletion of this folder?

gsahli · Nov 17, 2011

Tejicano said:
I can both read and write to the external drive. The reason I bought it was because it had that ability....so I might be wrong but I dont think that is really the issue.

Well, just to help us understand this - what software did you install to allow you to read and write to NTFS drives?

Tejicano · Nov 17, 2011

I guess I did have the paragon thing going because I just opened up the .dmg file it came with to install the external hard drive and it had given me 2 options.

Option 1: Mac and PC - Exchange music, pictures, videos and documents between a Mac and a PC. Requires installation of the included Paragon NTFS for Mac driver to enable 2-way Mac OS and Windows use.

Option 2: Mac only - Erase the drive to prepare it for use with all your mac applications, including Time Machine and the included Mac backup software from Seagate. Warning: this will erase all other data stored on drive.

I had set this up at home with Option 1 which allowed me to move all my files from the old hard drive to this one. I can read and write with fairly no issues on this drive. However...when it comes to uploading the music to my itunes...it always quits after a few hours of uploading. I began to consolidate the music and was going to delete about 70GB that are in a folder leaving only about 150 or so for itunes but its this folder that I'm having major issues getting rid of. I stopped even trying with itunes because I'm wondering at this point...what the heck is up with this large folder not deleting.

gsahli · Nov 17, 2011

OK, thanks for the info RE Paragon.
Sounds like a software bug :-(
I'd look in the Console Utility logs for any hints about what's wrong. (around the time of the panic)

I had similar problems with large numbers of files in ancient versions of MacOS, but not recently.

Any possibility you're down to less than 2 GB of drive space on the startup drive? And that OS X gets messed up when it runs out of swap space?

Tejicano · Nov 17, 2011

I have plenty of space on the Mac drive (about 88gb). If there is or are any issues it seems to be only in the folder I'm trying to delete which is only on the external drive itself. When I unplug the drive from the computer, the trash shows it's been emptied, but when I plug in the hard drive the trash shows the folder hasn't emptied from the trash yet.