External drive - empty trash issue.

Not sure if this is where this post belongs, and if it's in the wrong place, I apologize in advance.

Have a Maxtor external drive, PowerBook G4 1.33. Cannot delete two files, says that the items are in use. This all came about after a power outage here during a storm... Have tried to use DiskWarrior 4.0 and to no avail. Cannot force empty, again, files in use. Would appreciate any assistance with this. I am NOT Terminal savvy, but not afraid of it. Additionally, running 10.4.11 and again, the problem is only with the external drive. Not a hardware failure to the best of my knowledge...Also, I cannot delete the .trash on the external drive where I am also having the same problem.

Thanks,
Chaz

download the demo of this program:
http://www.northernsoftworks.com/leopardcachecleaner.html

Somewhere in the menu is the ability to force empty the trash. I own the program and it works great. Also, if you find it helpful, buy it. It's not expensive and is really good (I bought my copy about 5 months back and I still use it).

The demo should do the force-empty though.
That should fix your issue :)

I gave it try and appreciate the info! Now, I have an issue where the drive does NOT appear on the desktop. As you might have guessed, this 200GB drive IS my backup and I have to have the data on this on baby. So, tried DiskWarrior and the drive appears there, but it tells me that there is a disk malfunction: 2 and the final "rebuild" button does not appear (my only option is to cancel).

At this point, I just need to get my critical data and a, willing to try just about anything!

Thanks!!

Dan K,

Thanks for the instructions; tired it "DiskWarrior has successfully built a new directory for the disk named "MaxEx." The new directory cannot replace the original directory because of a disk malfunction."

Disk shows up with Disk Utility - just can't mount it.

Thoughts??