MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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I'm selling my old macbook and have just installed a new HD bought off another STW user he has asked me to format the HD.
How should I do this the HD has leopard installed and I will be installing tiger if that makes a difference.
I want to do it properly as it has pics of his family and his address info, as well as being very kind to me in sending a HD before payment.
Well to be honest he really should have done this himself before sending you the drive.
What I have done in the past is to delete all the data on the Hard Drive then open the disk utility and overwrite the free space on the HD. This is likely to take a while, especially if you chose the 35 pass option, so probably best to run this overnight. Once that's done load your DVD into the drive and boot the machine from the disk (use the help funciton to tell you what key to press) then do a clean install of the OS.
This is about the most secure way of deleting the data and installing the new OS. It's not perfect but the only way to do that is to physically destory the disk which kind of defeats the point really.
Is it really the only way to destroy data by destroying the disk, I have heard similar but thought it was an old wives tale.
Andy,
it's fairly straightforward:
1. Insert the Mac OS X CD.
2. Restart the computer.
3. Immediately after the startup sound, press and hold the "C" key to start up from CD.
4. When the Installer screen appears, do not click Continue. Instead, choose Installer > Open Disk Utilities.
5. Select the hard drive to erase.
6. Click the Erase tab.
7. Select the volume format from the Volume Format pop-up menu.
8. Click Options.
9. Select the checkbox for "Zero all data".
10. Click OK.
11. Click Erase.
It's the only [i]absolute[/i] way of doing it, however if you do what I've suggested then it would be insanely difficult (though not impossible) to recover the data and can probably only be achieved government agencies. If it makes you feel any better, I did this on a laptop that I sold on eBay and it contained my bank details, photos, etc. You can paranoia too far.
Is it really the only way to destroy data by destroying the disk, I have heard similar but thought it was an old wives tale.
Only if the CIA are after you (or a company who has hundreds of thousands of pounds to spend on the job.) To the average person, format and overwrite with zeros once is enough that there is no way it will be worth anyone's while getting stuff off.
Even then, even someone with all the tools, time and money is unlikely to be able to get it off ( http://www.h-online.com/news/Secure-deletion-a-single-overwrite-will-do-it--/112432 )
Joe
Is it really the only way to destroy data by destroying the disk, I have heard similar but thought it was an old wives tale.
Yes, it's an old wives tale
Before somebody jumps in with "YU NEED 2 ERAS IT 7 TIMES LOL" or "DRILL A HOLE IN IT AND SMASH IT WIV A HAMMER LOL" I'd like them to explain how they/anybody can recover data from a modern hard disk which has been filled with zeros.
I think what a lot of people get confused by is that simply erasing the file system/deleting the files normally just removes the inode pointing at the file without removing the data from the disk. If you do this, then yes it is sometimes possible to recover some of the data.
Start the laptop from the install disk.Fire up disk utility (from the menubar, don't quit the installer or you'll get a restart) and select your disk in the left column, click on the erase tab to the right. Select an erase option, probably one that over-writes a large number of times. Click go and leave it alone for several hours while it does its stuff.
oh okay so similar to installing the OS in the first place, thanks.