Struggling to empty Recycle Bin

mindrot · 24 Oct 2010 at 13:31

Hi,

I'm having problems emptying my Recycle Bin (Win 7). What happened was I was compressing some backed up work with Win RAR (around 6GB) last night to burn onto DVD. I was going to split it up in to a bunch of 2500mb files, except I forgot to put in the "mb" after the 2500 when entering the amount to split the volumes by. Anyway, around half way through the process I decided to check on the progress and noticed it had been creating 3KB files instead. Around 880000 of them :eek:

!!!! It took me forever to delete them

. Now I'm trying to empty out the recycle bin and it's taking for-freaking-ever to display the contents. I've tried just right clicking on the recycle bin on the desktop to empty it but nothing happens.

I also held down shift when I originally deleted the 3kb files to just delete them rather than send them to the recycle bin :confused:

Are there any work arounds for this?

Any help would be much appreciated.

UnworthyBean · 24 Oct 2010 at 13:42

You could give ccleaner a go, that will empty the recycle bin for you.

mindrot · 24 Oct 2010 at 14:02

Thanks. Giving ccleaner a go now

mindrot · 24 Oct 2010 at 14:17

It's been running for about 5-10 minutes now (just on the recycle bin) and it's on 0% :confused:

mindrot · 24 Oct 2010 at 14:52

Nothing seems to be happening should it take a while to empty the recycle bin then?

Randomface74 · 24 Oct 2010 at 15:01

at the end of the day, reboot, right click on bin, empty, walk away.

see what it looks like in the morning

mindrot · 24 Oct 2010 at 15:16

billysielu said:
at the end of the day, reboot, right click on bin, empty, walk away.

see what it looks like in the morning

Thanks. I'd do that but I still need to wait for the prompt that asks if I actually want to delete all the contents -that never appears

It all worked fine when I was deleting all those 3kb RAR files, aside from taking forever.

When I go into the recycle bin the green bar at the top takes for ever, the closer it gets to the end the longer it takes.

This is driving me up the wall :mad:

Destination · 24 Oct 2010 at 15:27

mindrot said:
I also held down shift when I originally deleted the 3kb files to just delete them rather than send them to the recycle bin

Can you explain this please?
You shift-deleted 800k files? Are you sure the shift action was accepted?

Can a single folder delete not do what you wanted?
Eitehr way, I think it is going to take some time to process 800k files, and then delete them, just leave it running for an hour and stop interfering with the process. Then come back and confirm the delete and leave it again, with small files it'll take as long to read them all for delete access as it will to actually remove them.

alistair55 · 24 Oct 2010 at 15:28

this may be a little different to above but have you tryed turning your screen up side down and seing if the files fall out???

whitecrook · 24 Oct 2010 at 15:30

should have used the cmd line. Deletes things instantly.

RMDIR /Q /S <directory>

mindrot · 24 Oct 2010 at 15:57

Hikari Kisugi said:
Can you explain this please?
You shift-deleted 800k files? Are you sure the shift action was accepted?

I did them in around 3-4 batches around 220k at a time. I held shift and pressed delete, it took around a 30 seconds to a minute to respond and then asked if I wanted to delete them... though I might not have done this for the first lot. So it's possibly only a large chunk of the 800k files in the recycle bin.

I'll try leaving it for a while then

whitecrook said:
should have used the cmd line. Deletes things instantly.

RMDIR /Q /S <directory>

I was wondering if there was any way to delete them from the recycle bin using the cmd line now? Though I'm no DOS expert. Last time I used it properly was years back.

mindrot · 24 Oct 2010 at 23:27

Thans for the help guys. It took ages but I got it all deleted... I hope