Preventing Recycle Bin errors on external drives

Today I learnt that my external hard drive has a Recycle Bin by going into Control Panel > (View by: Large Icons) > File Explorer Options > View > Show hidden files, folders and drives (select) > Hide protected operating system files (Recommended) - (unclick) > Apply > OK, then going into the external drive from File Explorer and viewing what is in the Recycle Bin for that drive letter and deleting it.

In addition it is possible to right click the Recycle Bin on the desktop select Properties > (select appropriate drive) > (Settings for selected location) > Don't move files to the Recycle Bin. Remove files immediately when deleted (select) > Display delete confirmation dialog (select) > Apply > OK.

Is this an advisable course of action in external hard drives, especially those which are encrypted, in order to prevent future errors?

In addition what happens in these external drives for the Custom size in Settings for selected location for the Recycle Bin capacity when the maximum size in MB is reached or passed?

Many thanks for any advice.

Hello,

Usually, the Recycle Bin is disabled for removable drives.

You can disable it below if this is considered a removable drive in Windows. Otherwise, the Recycle Bin is stored on the drive, and has all the usual settings.

I think the Recycle Bin was enabled by default in my WD My Passport 2TB external drive and I have just disabled it...

In relation to internal HDDs my understanding is that any data deleted in any partition other than the C drive immediately goes to the Recycle Bin of the C drive first...

Each drive has it's own recycle bin storage on it, but all referenced in the main Recycle Bin on your desktop.

Many thanks for your informative link. I did not have the concentration to take it all in late last night!

I think I may have created the problem myself by running a 36 hour DBAN secure scan last weekend and possibly stretching the hardware of the mechanical drive. I needed to run this as I don't believe the Western Digital WD Drive Utilities Drive Erase function is sufficient for secure deletion purposes and I did not want to use the other alternative which would have been to have got the hammer out of the cupboard!

Nevertheless the external drive passed a WD extended drive test last night and I have just run chkdsk from Windows 11 with no errors found. There did not appear to be any errors yesterday when I was testing the drive unencrypted but this error has come now this morning again after I set up WD encryption yesterday so one line of thinking is that this may possibly be an encryption error. I just checked now and there are no files in $RECYCLE.BIN and for the purposes of this test the Recycle Bin folder on the desktop was set to remove files immediately when deleted for this drive. I am running a full security scan on this drive and will report back any malware should this be the case.

I have never had this problem before and am thinking of buying a new external drive as this will be one of my main external HDDs and I don't want to take any risks of data loss or corruption at this stage, unless the problem below is being reported on a larger basis by users of Windows 11 and 10 and with no data loss or corruption consequences...

I attach a screenshot of the message I got below when I started my laptop this morning.

After finding some additional suggestions online and making sure to show hidden files and protected operating system files, I actually deleted the $RECYCLE.BIN folder in the external drive. The folder $RECYCLE.BIN and it's attached file Recycle Bin recreated itself almost immediately after deletion.

I hope that this solution, as well as eliminating any potential malware from the external drive, will help to solve this problem.

That's the usual fix for a corrupted Recycle Bin to hopefully sort it.

Many thanks. I will keep your notes in mind for these types of problems.