Windows 10: Windows 10 Home does not empty recycle bin

I successfully upgraded from Windows 8.1 to 10 last week.
For the 1st time since the upgrade, I tried emptying my recycle bin. However, it *appears* to fail, in that the dialog box that pops up shows "Discovered 0 items (0 bytes)" indefinitely. More details shows the useless "Time remaining: Calculating" message, and nothing useful.
The dialog box has been doing this for 2 hours; nothing has changed. It's neither discovered anything nor progressed. I am able to cancel the dialog box, but when I retry, it goes back to "discovering 0 bytes".



I'm on a pretty powerful Dell Inspiron 15R, 16GB RAM, Intel i7 CPU, 1 TB HDD, that's now running Windows 10 Home, 64-bit.
Any thoughts?

:)

 

"Empty recycle bin" missing from Sound menu

I want to enable the "empty recycle bin" sound for when I empty the trash bin but when I go to Sound in settings, and then Sounds, "Empty recycle bin" is not listed in the Program Events.

How do I add it?

Windows 10 Home, version 10.0.14393 build 14393

Thanks!

 

hotkey lost on the right click menu of recycle bin?

When i upgraded to the latest version of Windows 10 Home Edition, I found that there was no hotkey for empty recycle bin (used to be ‘B’) on the right click menu of the recycle bin icon. May I ask why?

 

Hello Kunalashar, and welcome to Ten Forums. *Smile

If you haven't already, restart the PC, and see if you area able to empty the Recycle Bin afterwards.

If that doesn't work, then you could see if doing the tutorial below may help.

Recycle Bin Corrupted - Cannot Delete File or Folder

 

Sorry no thoughts on fixing that problem mine works fine however a work around may be to install CCleaner that will empty your recycle bin.

 

Thank you Brink/Administrator.
I had already rebooted my system.

My laptop has 2 drives, C: and F:. The RD command works on the Recycle Bin of C: (control returns to the command prompt immediately), but does not work on the Recycle Bin of F:. As before, the command prompt seems to have hung or gone to sleep when running RD /S /Q F:\$RECYCLE.BIN

PS: My F: Recycle bin has just 305 KB of files to be cleaned. It has 365 GB free space.

 

Ironically, Bazz, I uncovered the problem when I tried running CCleaner. It seemed to hang when emptying the recycle bin. That's when I stopped it, tried to manually clear the bin using Windows 10 OS, which too, hung. That's when I posted this thread.
I just initiated a CHKDSK. Let's see how that goes.

 

Is the F: drive one that you can format after copying the data somewhere else temporarily?

 

I don't know if this is relevant, but the reason that I wanted to clean out my recycle bin was because my laptop has been taking ages to come out of hibernation or reboot after the upgrade to Windows 10.
Immediately after the upgrade, it was blazingly fast. Now, it's slower than molasses in winter. That's when I tried running CCleaner, but it couldn't clean the recycle bin.

 

Yes, I could. It's my last option if all else fails.

 

Ahh so to recap you can empty the recycle bin for files on the C drive but not for the other drives. If this is the case can you allow to see hidden files and folders and delete the recycler folder on the other drive, not sure this will help but worth a shot before you format.

 

Delete too does notwork; on F:, even running rmdir /q /s on F:\$RECYCLE.BIN through an elevated command prompt behaves as before - simply does nothing, and seems to hang.
And the CHKDSK too failed, with the same behavior. When running CHKDSK on F:, it halts at 12%, and remains there indefinitely.

 

Hey Brink what's up!

He might have a file in his recycle bin that's protected, do you approve of "Unlocker"?, I just used it to delete a file that got hung up in there. It's over on MajorGeeks, watch out for the opt-in, it's the Babylon toolbar virus, choose custom install and then de-select "Delta Toolbar" and that will safely load Unlocker. It still works in Windows 10.

I don't know if that's an approved tool, because the installer has that virus, but as long as you opt out of it, you're safe.

 

Hey Jonny,

I would think that it would have been deleted to the Recycle Bin if it was protected.

May need to format F if Unlocker can't delete F:\$RECYCLE.BIN.

 

I might have found the cause - and resolution - to the problem (or it could just be a fluke).

I had OneDrive running; the moment I killed it (not just stopped or paused it, but forcefully killed the process), I was able to BOTH empty the recycle bin AND delete the $RECYCLE.BIN folder. Incidentally, my OneDrive folder in Windows 10 was directly under F: (F:\OneDrive).

I've heard of OneDrive being problematic on Windows 10, but I didn't tie it into this problem.

If it helps someone else with the same problem, the "solution" that worked for me was to stop and kill OneDrive on Windows 10. This allowed me to empty the recycle bin, delete F:\$RECYCLE.BIN and successfully complete CHKDSK.