Wiping iMac

musical87 · Dec 11, 2012

Hi guys, looking for a bit of help with my old iMac.

Just bought a new one and looking to pass my old one on to a family member, its running Snow Leopard at the moment.

I want to wipe it but I don't have the Snow Leopard disk.

What would be the best way to go about doing this without the disk?

Thanks

iMikeT · Dec 11, 2012

Can this old iMac of yours run 10.8 Mountain Lion? If it can, you can make an external recovery/bootable disk and use Disk Utility to erase the drive clean (be sure to write zeros to the drive just in case). Afterward, you can then install OS X on the iMac.

Also, Apple began selling Snow Leopard again recently. So there is that option.

justperry · Dec 11, 2012

musical87 said:
Hi guys, looking for a bit of help with my old iMac.

Just bought a new one and looking to pass my old one on to a family member, its running Snow Leopard at the moment.

I want to wipe it but I don't have the Snow Leopard disk.

What would be the best way to go about doing this without the disk?

Thanks

You can still buy a snow Leopard disk on Apple's site, I believe it's something like $20.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard $19.99

flatfoot · Dec 11, 2012

musical87 said:
...

What would be the best way to go about doing this without the disk?

...

Clone the internal HDD to an external one, boot from that and wipe the internal one.

If you just want to wipe your user files, create a new admin user, log into it, erase your old user via the "Accounts" prefpane and erase free space using Disk Utility.

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Wiping iMac

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