Kevin Sherman Posted January 29, 2008 Share Posted January 29, 2008 Hey all. A long ways back when I first got Leopard, I activated Time Machine. Perhaps a neat backup solution, it sucks (IMO) for laptops. So I deactivated Time Machine and removed my External drive from the Time Machine setup. Thing is, there is 230GB of used space on my external drive that I need freed up (never though I would run out of space on a 500GB drive, its a brave new world!). I have tried simply using the Finder, it goes through the process of deleting everything, but nothing actually gets deleted. Fun. Then I got knowledgeable and used the Terminal, doing a little cd /Volumes/External action with a little sudo rm -rf Backup.backupdb (of course then entering my little admin password) Immediately every file returns with a File location string and a fun little : Operation not permitted. message. Any suggestions? I don't have the ability to copy the files I want to keep and reformat the drive, I don't have any hard drives big enough to back up too. Thanks all... KS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ipguy Posted January 29, 2008 Share Posted January 29, 2008 Hey all. A long ways back when I first got Leopard, I activated Time Machine. Perhaps a neat backup solution, it sucks (IMO) for laptops. So I deactivated Time Machine and removed my External drive from the Time Machine setup. Thing is, there is 230GB of used space on my external drive that I need freed up (never though I would run out of space on a 500GB drive, its a brave new world!). I have tried simply using the Finder, it goes through the process of deleting everything, but nothing actually gets deleted. Fun. Then I got knowledgeable and used the Terminal, doing a little cd /Volumes/External action with a little sudo rm -rf Backup.backupdb (of course then entering my little admin password) Immediately every file returns with a File location string and a fun little : Operation not permitted. message. Any suggestions? I don't have the ability to copy the files I want to keep and reformat the drive, I don't have any hard drives big enough to back up too. Thanks all... KS mount the external drive and use diskutils to "erase the volume"... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skyhighmac Posted January 29, 2008 Share Posted January 29, 2008 Yeah. Thats the easiest way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kevin Sherman Posted January 29, 2008 Author Share Posted January 29, 2008 Hmm. Well, I am not really able to pull the files I need off the external drive. I don't have access to a hard drive of sufficient size... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ipguy Posted January 29, 2008 Share Posted January 29, 2008 Hmm. Well, I am not really able to pull the files I need off the external drive. I don't have access to a hard drive of sufficient size... then all i can suggest is to burn multiple dvd's until you have all the files you want from the time machine disk then reformat ! space is a finite resource, if your out, your out ! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
idividebyzero Posted January 30, 2008 Share Posted January 30, 2008 Try creating a new admin account, log in and delete the folder. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Colonel Posted January 30, 2008 Share Posted January 30, 2008 sudo rm -rf /files/to/delete Tried that yet? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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