Unable to use the Trash, things are thrown away immediately

[Terry Vogelaar]

Hi, here's a complex one...

Before upgrading to Leopard, I decided to use SuperDuper to make a Sandbox on another partition. Then I upgraded the Sandbox to Leopard and used that as a startup volume some time. All worked fine on Leopard, except that Adobe CS3 licensing considered both partitions as separate computers. So I could only use it on either Tiger or Leopard. That took away the advantages of having a sandbox.

So I decided to not use the sandbox anymore. I upgraded the Tiger partition to Leopard and use that as my startup volume.

Then the problem occurred. Since then, I am unable to use the trash on my system. As soon as I move something to the trash, I get a warning "The item 'yadayada' will be removed immediately. Are you sure you want to continue?" This is normal when I want to trash something from a remote server in my network, but I get this all the time, everywhere on my boot drive. (My external drives that don't register permissions are fine)

I don't care too much about the trash, but it is annoying to confirm everything. And of course my main concern is that it is not normal behaviour, which often precedes big problems...

Running Tech Tool Pro and repairing permissions with Disk Utility didn't help anything.

Any clues?

[dnanian]

Well, in general Leopard is too different to use in a Sandbox. But the issue here seems like a Leopard issue -- I'd check with Apple.

[mikebore]

I have had this problem in the past....not Leopard. Can't remember the details of fixing it by essentially you don't have the correct permissions on your invisble ".trashes" file(s). I expect if you google it you will find something. Otherwise you could try making .trashes visible and altering ownership with batchmod, or XRay or similar. Simple repair permissions via Disk Utility didn't do it.

EDIT Just found this link:

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/trash.html

Scroll down a bit to find your problem.

[Terry Vogelaar]

Mike, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Rebuilding the trash as described in http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/trash.html#Anchor-Empty-49575 did the trick for me!

Fortunately, archive and install is quite drastic, so I was still backuping and moving files to prepare when I received your message.

Very helpful. You made my day.

Terry