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can't wipe hard drive on faulty mac

B

barnsley7

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 19, 2014
5
0
I'd like to sell my macbook for spares or repair.

it's quite old around 2005/6 (using snow leopard 10.6) and will only boot up in safe mode.
I can't boot it up when trying to boot a restore dvd - (in recovery mode cmd+R) as I just get those scrambled horizontal lines (as I do when trying to boot in normal mode).

I'd like to wipe it clean before selling, however I don't seem to be able to do anything with it.

is there anything else I can try to reset it?
 
rigormortis

rigormortis

macrumors 68000
Jun 11, 2009
1,813
229
the easier way to wipe a hard disk in a mac without having to open the mac and deal with enclosures and misplacing screws would be target disk mode.

you connect your old mac to your new mac using firewire or thunderbolt.
and press and hold the T key during boot on the old mac. and it will show up
as an external drive on the other mac, and then u can use the other mac to erase it.

if its a SSD do a 1 pass full wipe. and pray that they don't try and get your data back ( if you used filevault then your perfectly fine with 1 pass )

if you have a mechanical hard disk, do 7 passes. at least let it do 3 full passes

dont wipe the recovery partition, only wipe the main partition

do your next owner a favor.

reinstall os x, and then shut down. that way when it is turned on for the very first time, it will say WELCOME TO OS X !! and the person will think he has a new computer and he will be able to do the 1st time setup

you can click on command R for regular recovery to install os x, or you can do option command r to do the recovery over the internet.

if the computer is actually defective, then you will have to do what dyt1983 says,
 
Last edited:
B

barnsley7

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 19, 2014
5
0
thanks,
i'll try the firewire method first.
I also have dban cd, so might try that, but as it doesn't boot from recovery cd i don't know yet if this will work.

i guess i should try to fix it first before selling, even if it means just replacing the hard drive for a new one (if thats easy enough to do, i dont know, i'll try and google it).
 
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