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# Removing Unremovable Files after Upgrading to macOS Catalina
- URL: https://www.justinw.me/blog/unremovable-files-macos-catalina/
- Published: 2019-08-22T15:42:08.000Z
- Updated: 2019-08-22T19:06:48.000Z
- Author: Justin Williams
- Tags: macOS, APFS, Apple

Against the better judgement of my own common sense, I decided to update my iMac to the macOS Catalina beta recently. One of the major internal changes in going from Mojave to Catalina is the [transition to a read-only System volume](https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/710/?ref=justinw.me). During this process, I ended up with a folder on my desktop of files that the upgrade was unable to handle. Most of these files seemed innocuous, and I just deleted them. There was one folder, however, that I couldn’t delete because the system claimed it wasn’t empty. Blowing it out via the Finder or the Terminal was a fruitless task.

In the interest of saving you time if you run into this scenario, these are the steps I took to solve my issue.

1. Reboot your Mac into [Recovery Mode](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314?ref=justinw.me). Authenticate your user account if required.
2. From the menu bar, open the Terminal application.
3. Disable [System Integrity Protection](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204899?ref=justinw.me) and reboot: `csrutil disable; reboot` .
4. Once your Mac reboots (and assuming it's still not in recovery mode), open the Terminal app.
5. You need to mount the new file system as read-write temporarily so we can blow the folder(s) away: `sudo mount -uw /`. This is temporary, and rebooting will revert back to the safer read-only variant.
6. Delete the files you want to purge via the `rm` command. You’ll probably need to use `sudo`.
7. As a last step, you need to re-enable System Integrity Protection. To do that, reboot back into Recovery mode.
8. From the Recovery Mode menu bar, open the Terminal application: `csrutil enable; reboot`

Once the reboot completes, your Mac should be back to the expected state, just with a few less zombie folders. You can verify SIP is active by opening Terminal and executing the `csrutil status` command.