Friend's iMac finder not responding because of failed massive drag and drop?

[Jerry®]

My friend has a 2007 iMac running 10.11. Last night a friend of his accidentally chose about 1000 music files from an an external drive and half-ass dragged them to the desktop of the iMac. My friend had unplugged all the external drives from his iMac by the time I got here to rectify the situation and all that happens is the finder just spins and spins. I relaunched it and it's ok for a second or two but then starts spinning. The system isn't completely frozen but it's difficult to do anything. I even booted it up into Safe Mode and still the same thing. My theory is that if I delete the finder plist it might do the trick but I could be wrong? Anyway to do that I'd have to be able to get to the right finder window or terminal but with the finder non responsive I'm at a loss.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Here's a photo of his screen showing all these aliased music files that apparently are holding the finder hostage:

[hal]

I would wait for better advice, but I would force quit the finder. That may not be enough, but should at least stop it from trying to continue the copy process.

great photo, btw - that's a nightmare finder...

[Jerry®]

hal wrote:
I would wait for better advice, but I would force quit the finder. That may not be enough, but should at least stop it from trying to continue the copy process.

great photo, btw - that's a nightmare finder...

Force quitting the finder only releases it for a couple seconds then back to spinning.

[Onamuji]

The bottleneck is where the Finder is trying to draw a thousand or more Desktop icons.

Boot from an external drive, open a new Finder window in list view and browse to his Desktop folder. Make a new folder and drag the entire contents of his Desktop folder into the new folder.

With his Desktop clean, everything should be back to normal.

[The Grim Ninja]

There's several different strategies for attack:

Can you do Target Disk Mode? Log in. Drag em to the trash.

Can you log into a different user? Log in. Drag em to the trash.

Can you boot from a different drive? Drag em to the trash.

Is file sharing active or can it be set active? Log in. Drag em to the trash.

Can you use other apps with bearable speed? Use terminal to delete the file types.

[Jerry®]

Onamuji wrote:
The bottleneck is where the Finder is trying to draw a thousand or more Desktop icons.

Boot from an external drive, open a new Finder window in list view and browse to his Desktop folder. Make a new folder and drag the entire contents of his Desktop folder into the new folder.

With his Desktop clean, everything should be back to normal.

We're trying to see if any of his externals are bootable.....

[Jerry®]

The Grim Ninja wrote:
There's several different strategies for attack:

Can you do Target Disk Mode? Log in. Drag em to the trash.

Can you log into a different user? Log in. Drag em to the trash.

Can you boot from a different drive? Drag em to the trash.

Is file sharing active or can it be set active? Log in. Drag em to the trash.

Can you use other apps with bearable speed? Use terminal to delete the file types.

He doesn't have a bootable backup
I'm at his apartment and no other Mac to connect to for Target Disk Mode
I can get Terminal to open but don't know what command to use

[modelamac]

Do you have a bootable external that you can take to his place and boot his Mac from that? You can then follow Onamuji's directions from your first thread.

[Jerry®]

modelamac wrote:
Do you have a bootable external that you can take to his place and boot his Mac from that? You can then follow Onamuji's directions from your first thread.

So I'm in his guest account - can I make a bootable backup from within his guest account?

[Onamuji]

Here's what I might try next (while logged in under his main user account, can use Spotlight to launch applications while the Finder is beachballing)...

Open the Terminal app...

Open the Activity Monitor...

Use the Activity Monitor to quit/kill the Finder.

Run a command in the Terminal to rename the Desktop folder.

Then reboot the Mac. Upon the next login, the OS should create a new Desktop folder. The old one with the new name should still be in the user's Home folder.

The command would be:

sudo mv ~/Desktop ~/OldDesktop

Be careful to word it just like that, including the spaces.