A couple of questions on upgrading and emptying trash

My girlfriend's iMac (OS X 10.1) has a folder with reportedly 1 TB of data -
this on a 30GB HDD. I've managed to deleted the folder, but now when I try
to empty the Trash there's Kernel exception, the iMac freezes and all those
stack numbers show up on the screen - the last one being something like
waiting for remote... Any ideas on how to delete this folder permanently?
Most of the disc repair tools I've seen are for 10.2 and up

Next question is about upgrading. I have the OS X 10.2 CDs (original) and
after making a backup of /users/... I've rebooted from the install disc...
After all the accept buttons, disclaimers, etc the Installer came to the
point where we can select the destination drive for the system. There was no
disc listed there. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance, from a mostly Windows user...

 

Back up everything that should be kept, and use Disk Utility (which can
be launched directly from the OS X installer; there's an option in one
of the menus) to reformat the drive (HFS+ format). It sounds like there
are definitely some file system problems. If the drive doesn't even show
up in Disk Utility, there might be some kind of hardware problem, but
it'll probably show up there, and once it's format you'll be able to
install.

To help guard against file system corruption in the future, you might
want to consider turning on journaling. It wasn't an advertised feature
until Panther, but it actually first arrived in one of the Jaguar
updates, so once you've allowed Software Update to upgrade Panther after
your install, consider popping open a terminal and pasting in:

sudo diskutil enableJournal /

(It'll ask you for a password; just use the account password.)

This also eliminates the need for file system checks after improper
shutdowns.

 

Yep, I've done a backup to my other computer on the network (Retrospect via
FTP) and to a firewire drive. I'll play with the reinstall today.

Thanks!