The recycle bin is too full.

I've been using a program to clean up tens of thousands of duplicate files in my Documents folder and now Im having trouble emptying it. When I open it up it freezes and the explorer.exe the memory goes up real high (I have 4GB of RAM but I still have to kill and restart explorer.exe) When I right click "Empty Recycle Bin" half the time nothing happens and the other half it just says "preparing to delete" for several minutes and then it freezes. Third party programs (e.g. CCleaner) freeze. I tried the trick where you change the Recycle Bin size to 0 and reboot. It worked the first time but now it doesn't. Any suggestions anyone?

Thanks

EDIT: One other note. All the files are being deleted off an external ahrd drive.

ANOTHER EDIT: The reason Im doing this is because somehow I ended up with 5+ duplicates of every file on my external. Its a long story.

 

Curious.

But the recycle bin remains I assume on your computer's HD?

What happens if you do a disk clean-up on your HD? This is also supposed to empty the recycle bin.

Next, I would try opening the HD and start emptying large groups of files, perhaps 100M at a time, and increasing with trial and error.

Another shot, cCleaner with all items unchecked except the recycle bin?

Just some ideas.

 

The disk-cleanup froze too. CCleaner is one of the third-party programs I tried.

I did try safe mode, however I had my external unplugged so when I booted back into normal mode and plugged it back in everything reappeared. So I thought about going into the $Recycle.Bin folder on the external but that sorta froze up again too and I had to kill explorer.

I finally managed to clean it out by using the command prompt to nuke the $Recycle.Bin folder on the external. This also deleted the Recycle Bin icon but I got it back.

I'm happy because I finally did something useful on the command line without screwing it up.

The problem wasn't so much that there was too much space being taken up. There were too many tiny little files (something like 50,000!). This can be considered solved now

 

Glad to hear.

Following seas to you.

 

egad, 50,000 files. Yeah, it may seem that it was locked up. But during those times, I typically check the hard drive status light and see if it is going crazy or not (solid light/rapid flashing).

Good to hear you got it resolved.

 

It is easy.

1. Open a elevated command prompt.

2. In the elevated command prompt, type rd /s /q C:\$Recycle.bin and press Enter. (See screenshot below)
NOTE: For the other hard drive letters, substitute C: for the other hard drive letter instead. For example: rd /s /q E:\$Recycle.bin



3. Close command prompt window.

4. Right click on a empty area of the desktop and click on Refresh.

NOTE 1: The Recycle Bin should be empty now. If not, then repeat these steps for any other hard drive letter that you have.

NOTE 2: You may need to repeat this inside of each hard drive letter that you have installed.