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This is one of the worst bugs I (Paul) have personally encountered in OS X.

A trashed Firefox disk image file became directly linked to "Macintosh HD" (yes, the entire hard drive), which was then stuck in the Trash, and when emptied actually started deleting system files before I noticed what was going on and ceased the activity. To make matters more complex, this mysterious "Macintosh HD" reference couldn't be removed from the Trash at all, and when opened from Trash the contents appeared empty. With tons of system level folders and components missing, OS X encountering a whole variety of unusual issues some of which were to be expected ranging fro many 'command not found' errors in Terminal, missing UI elements with a Finder refresh, and other problems - the system installation was clearly toast.

Presumed to be a Finder bug since "Macintosh HD" did not show up in ~/.Trash/ when viewed through ls -la at the command line.

The solution, given that tons of system level files were no longer available, was to re-install OS X via the Recovery method, as discussed here:


Aside from what's seen here, unable to reproduce this or find any other references to any similar bug. Experienced in OS X 10.11.3 on a MacBook Pro 13" Retina.