Can't delete a directory on external drive (OS X)

Posted by Martin Tóth on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Martin Tóth
Published on 2011-01-05T15:43:24Z Indexed on 2011/01/05 15:55 UTC
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Filed under:

osx

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macbook

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filesystems

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mount

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delete

I have a brand new Transcend StoreJet 25M3 (external HDD) mounted to MacBook (Leopard 10.5.8) at /Volumes/Transcend. I copied some data from my old Windows (XP) machine on it, and now, after cleaning some stuff up, I wanted to delete some directories, but this is what happened:

$ rmdir My\ Pictures/
rmdir: My Pictures/: Operation not permitted

Using Finder just asks for password, but does not delete the directory (sound of "moved to Trash" is played).

I thought it's some permission "thing", but:

$ ls -l
drwxrwxrwx  1 martin  staff   32768  5 jan 16:11 My Pictures/

$ sudo rm -rf My\ Pictures
rm: My Pictures: Operation not permitted

I re-mounted, rebooted (thinking that there's some file lock), but that did not help.

What might have happened here? How to delete it?

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