Can't trash

luckat

I'm trying to trash a load of stuff from an external hard drive. I was using it as a kind of backup, just dragging stuff on, but decided to do it properly and use SuperDuper.

But I'm getting many, many messages saying items can't be trashed because they're locked.

Is there any way I can unlock everything that's in the trash, and then trash it?

Breezer

Can you move the files to the Trash, and just can't empty it? If so, do so, then open up Terminal. Type the following:

sudo rm -r ~/.Trash

You'll be prompted for your password. Once you enter it, they'll be deleted, but you won't be able to move things to the Trash anymore, they'll just get deleted immediately. To fix this, log out and log back in.

luckat

Sorry, panicked for a minute there. Actually when I held down cmd-opt-shft-del it trashed ok.

Only thing is that I wanted to empty the disk so that I could get SuperDuper to partition it, to use half for backup and half for faffing-around purposes (music, etc), but I can't now see how to get SuperDuper to do that.

Breezer

To my knowledge SuperDuper can't do that. Use Disk Utility

K.O.Kiki

When you partition a disk, all the information is made inaccessible (IIRC some of it is still there and unviewable).
Therefore, just use Disk Utility to partition the drive, no need to clear it first.