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emac to go can't erase disc
- Thread starter flyinhigh
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You should be able to boot it from a USB stick. Depending on what exact model of eMac you have, this may be as simple as plugging in a bootable USB disk and booting into boot manager(hold down option at start up), or you may have to boot into Open Firmware and use some commands from there to boot.
You will need to format the USB drive as Mac OS Extended(Journaled) and using Apple Partition Map. You can do all of this from disk utilities. If given the option, also check "install OS 9 drivers."
If your eMac is capable of booting into OS 9, probably the simplest thing to do would be to drag and drop an OS 9 system folder onto the USB disk(you may need to rebless the folder after doing this).
Alternatively, restore an image of an OS X install disk to the USB drive and then boot into the installer. You can access disk utilities from one of the drop-down menus once the installer loads, and reformat the drive. You also have access to a variety of "secure erase" options from disk utility, including a complete overwrite, 7 pass overwrite, and a 35 pass overwrite. The last two can take a long time and are probably overkill for most purposes.
You will need to format the USB drive as Mac OS Extended(Journaled) and using Apple Partition Map. You can do all of this from disk utilities. If given the option, also check "install OS 9 drivers."
If your eMac is capable of booting into OS 9, probably the simplest thing to do would be to drag and drop an OS 9 system folder onto the USB disk(you may need to rebless the folder after doing this).
Alternatively, restore an image of an OS X install disk to the USB drive and then boot into the installer. You can access disk utilities from one of the drop-down menus once the installer loads, and reformat the drive. You also have access to a variety of "secure erase" options from disk utility, including a complete overwrite, 7 pass overwrite, and a 35 pass overwrite. The last two can take a long time and are probably overkill for most purposes.
If you have another Mac with Firewire you can use Firewire Target Disk Mode to mount the eMac's HD on your other Mac and erase it.
How to use and troubleshoot FireWire target disk mode
How to use and troubleshoot FireWire target disk mode