[CentOS] How to remove a Trash folder from a mounted ntfs partition

Sat Oct 22 21:59:47 UTC 2011
Yves Bellefeuille <yan at storm.ca>

On Friday 21 October 2011 11:24, James B. Byrne wrote:

> CentOS-5.7 using fuse-ntfs-3g

> I have mouunted the HDD on my desktop as an ntfs
> filesystem using an external SATA / USB adapter.  As root
> I then used the gnome desktop to move the desired files to
> trash.  Now I wish to delete the contents of the trash
> folder and the folder itself. This I cannot do.  I have
> tried deleting using rm -rf ./.Trash-root but the command
> simply has no effect.  It raises no error and it does not
> remove the Directory or its contents.

You say that the disk is formatted as NTFS, presumably for use with 
Windows, yet you mention deleting the files with the Gnome desktop and 
then deleting them from .Trash. I'm therefore very confused about how 
you're trying to delete the files.

If the files to be deleted are in a NTFS filesystem which is mounted 
under Linux, simple delete them. Since Windows isn't running, they 
won't be moved to Windows's trash directory, called $Recycle.Bin.

I think that you should be more concerned about deleting Windows's swap 
file (pagefile.sys), $Recycle.Bin, and the directory \System Volume 
Information, and then overwriting the free space. Even better, if the 
disk is to be replaced, why not overwrite the entire disk using shred?

Regards,

-- 
Yves Bellefeuille <yan at storm.ca>
"La Esperanta Civito ne rifuzas anticipe la kunlaboron de erarintoj, se
ili konscias pri sia eraro." -- Heroldo Komunikas, n-ro 473.