Erasing hard drive

[Maccheese]

I have a new Imac and was going to give my old powermac away to a local charity. I used the old mac quite a bit for financial transactions including banking, mortgage payments, etc. I was told to be careful because all this information remains on the hard drive.

If I erase the hard drive, is all that information truly erased from my system or should I just destroy the computer and not donate it? Or, if erasing the hard drive doesn't truly erase, is there a software package that eliminates old information from macintosh systems? Thanks.:confused:

[FattyMembrane]

if you go through a process called "zeroing the hard drive" which is available in the disk utility for 10.2.3 and above (and os9 i think), it should completely erase the drive with little to no chance for recovery of anything. you could of course just pull the hard drive and let the charity know that it will need to procure one, if it feels like going that far. if the machine works with osx and you have a cd burner, just use bootcd to make a 10.2.3-4 boot disk (it automatically includes disk utility) and erase the drive, then re-install whatever os you want.

[Maccheese]

I'll try it although I don't believe there's enough memory to hold system X.

[billyboy]

OS9.2 has a disk utility to zero all data. As was mentioned, zeroing means simply overwriting all your precious data with zeroes. According to Apple Knowledge base, to achieve the same effect you can also overwrite all data with rubbish/non-sensitive files. ie fill the hard drive with rubbish.

[Eniregnat]

For os 9.x

tucows.com (www.tucows.com)
There are a few file utilities here (http://mac.tucows.com/filemanage_removers_default.html)of the sort your looking for.


This one, Burn (http://mac.tucows.com/preview/206704.html). It offers all 0’s,1’s, or random, and will cycle up to 14 times. Its freeware.