Friday April 22, 2005
Skeletons on your hard drive / Selling your Mac
News.com had an article recently about how many PC users do a bad job of wiping their hard drive before selling, donating, or trashing their PC. Obviously this is a bad thing considering the sensitive information the average person keeps on their PC.
I understand why this is difficult for the average PC user. Wiping a hard drive is a tedious process for a PC. Properly wiping a hard drive is very easy on a Mac, however. If you are planning on selling or giving away your Mac, here are some easy steps,/p>
Things you will need:
- The Mac you will be getting rid of, which we will call "old Mac". (Firewire port required)
- Any other Mac (henceforth "new Mac") running OS X (Firewire port required).
- Firewire cable (9pin to 9pin)
Steps to permanently erase the hard drive of an old Mac.
- Take one last look at the files on your old Mac to make sure there are no data files you still need. The whole point of this process is to delete the data permanently and there will be no way to recover the data after we are finished.
- Connect the two Macs using the FireWire cable.
- Reboot the old Mac into FireWire target mode. To do this, reboot the old Mac while holding the "T" key.
- Open the Disk Utility on the new Mac. You will see the hard drive of the old Mac shown as a FireWire connected volume.
- Select the FireWire volume representing your old Mac. (Not the hard drive disk, but the volume with the FireWire icon.) There should be five tabs on the right side of the screen when you do this. (First aid, erase, partition, RAID, restore)
- Select the erase tab.
- Select the options... button on the bottom right of the window.
- Check "8 Way Random write Format" and then OK
- Select to the erase button on the bottom right of the window.
- One last chance to back out. Make sure absolutely sure you have the right volume selected and that you no longer need the data on the old Mac. Once you are absolutely sure, select Erase to begin the process of wiping the old drive.
- Wait. This is not a quick process: you are completely erasing every part of the old hard drive multiple times. You can continue to use the new Mac while the old Mac is erased, but the process will take a long time. Typically overnight or longer: don't put off erasing the disk until the last minute.
Nothing really too much different than a PC, but the built-in secure disk overwrite and firewire target mode makes it much more convenient on a Mac.
(2005-04-22 10:10:34.0)
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