Preparing to sell

Neiloid said:

Hi

Having just bought a 2011 2.3 Mac Mini with Lion OS three weeks ago I now need to sell it and want to clear all my data and reinstall the OS. Will installing the OS from the the recovery partition erase all my data and leave the Mini box fresh for the new owner to set up as their own?

Thanks in advance.

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It will. If you are paranoid or thorough, you might want to wipe the drive first then install, you can choose to write zeros to it first (this actually makes the data unrecoverable), or for the classified secrets level (a bit unnecessary in my book), do a 7 pass overwrite.

Neiloid said:

Thanks for your quick reply.

So if I wipe the drive and move the slider one to the right from quick erase it will write to zeros - I can then restore from the recovery partition as this will not be wiped I assume....?

Cheers, Neil

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You need to boot from another volume to erase the main volume, either from an install disk or recovery partition, then move the slider to the right to increase security of wipe i.e. write zeros. Either change the startup disk under system utilities or hold option while you boot up

I never use the recovery partition, so I'm not that familiar with it, as I always make an install USB stick or have a bootable clone before I do anything.

Yes. You're good to go.