Windows 7 - Recycle bin

Why, when I am asked if I want to send a document to the recycle bin and say yes, is there nothing there? I have deleted 100s of files and the bin is empty.Why?

Hello Jenny, and welcome to Seven Forums.

If you open the Recycle Bin, do you see any of the files in there in case it may just be the icon showing empty when it actually is not?

Recycle Bin - Fix For Custom Icons Not Refreshing

or

Recycle Bin - Vista Forums


Also, double check to see if you have the Recycle Bin set to permanently delete files.

Hope this helps for now,
Shawn

Permanently delete files box is not checked. I have never seen a file in the recycle bin - not sure I quite understand the point about icons! Thanks for your help anyway.

Jenny

Sometimes the Recycle Bin icon (Windows 7) will show the "empty" icon instead of the "full" icon even though the Recycle Bin is not empty and has files in it. When this happens, the Recycle Bin icon is not refreshing properly. When you said that there was nothing there, I just needed to know exactly what you meant by that. Nothing there as in empty Recycle Bin icon, or nothing there as in no files in opened Recycle Bin. That's all.


I noticed you have another post about the Recycle Bin here: Recycle bin

Is the issue here with the Windows 7 Recycle Bin on your desktop, or the one in WLM Hotmail?

I understand now about the icons. When I open the recycle bin it says 0 items. Have only had new computer a couple of weeks so hadn't looked in the bin until I wanted to recover a file deleted by mistake. I am talking about the Windows 7 recycle bin - not the WLM Hotmail. That is a separate problem - nothing to do with recycling!

Cheers

Jenny
In OZ

Hello Jenny,

Your recycle bin may be corrupted. Try the following steps:

Recycle Bin Corrupted - Cannot Delete File or Folder - Vista Forums

1) This procedure permanently deletes files and folders that are already in the Recycle Bin and cannot be recovered.

Open an elevated Command Prompt window. To open an elevated Command Prompt, click Start, type cmd, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator.

Type the following command and press ENTER:

rd /s /q C:\$Recycle.bin

(This clears out the $Recycle.bin folder from the C:\ partition)

Exit the Command Prompt window.

2) If that does not help, run an sfc scan to repair system corruption.

SFC /SCANNOW Command - System File Checker

I had a similar problem. I'm setup to dual boot XP and Win 7 with additional drives for storage. Like you nothing was showing up in Win 7 recycle bin. It's odd but I noticed the settings for Recycle Bin in Win 7 were not the same as the settings in XP. I changed the settings in both OS's to match each others OS and the custom size for each storage drive was set the same. All drives had different custom sizes but I made sure they matched in XP and Win 7. Example would be

XP C: 4 gigs
Win 7 E: 2 gigs
Storage F: Don't move files to recycle bin
Storage H: 11 gigs

After the sizes above were the same for recycle bin in Win 7 as they were in XP, the files started showing up. Weird I know but it worked for me. May not apply to you but sharing info just in case

I find that pressing F5 with the Recycling Bin selected refreshes it quickly. I do the same when creating a new folder so the name gets righr.

Bye.