How can I trash a “windows.old” folder in Mac OS X?

Question

I deleted the windows.old folder when I am in Mac OS X and it is now in the trash. However, I found neither can I empty the trash nor put the folder back to the drive with Windows installed.

If I choose empty trash, my Mac OS X will crash, if I choose secure empty trash, there will be a window pop-up saying that some files in the windows.old folder are read-only and then stops the deleting process. Now how can I delete the windows.old, because it’s size is large and I want my storage back.

Answer 1

Just open up a Terminal window in Mac OS X and run a command like this:

rm -rf /Users/cwang/.Trash/windows.old

I’m assuming your user’s name is clang but just change that to match whatever user name that’s dealing with this issue and just run that command.

If somehow that still doesn’t work, I would then recommend rebooting your Mac in “Recovery Mode.” And then once you are fully booted into the “Recovery Mode” volume, open up the Terminal and do the following:

ls /Volumes/

That will list all connected volumes associated with your machine. Remember, when you are in “Recovery Mode” you are booting from a different volume than your main disk, so you need to figure out the full path to your main disk to fix things like this. Now note your system’s true volume name which might be something like Hard Disk/. With that noted, you can then run the rm -rf command like this:

rm -rf /Volumes/Hard\ Disk/Users/cwang/.Trash/windows.old

And that should get rid of the windows.old directory as well. Now just reboot into your main Mac OS X volume and you should be good to go.