12 inch MacBook - Preparing for Sale (Quick Question)

[DSTOFEL]

I'm preparing to sell my 2015 12 inch MacBook to someone today and and I'm going through an article from Apple on this topic (i.e. preparing your MacBook for Sale) and just have a very specific question that I'm hoping someone can help clarify on one of the steps.

When I get to the step where I use disc utility to "erase the the HD" (see link below), should I erase/reformat the entire SSD or just my Mac HD volume? Note: I only have 1 volume on the SSD labeled "Macintosh HD".

I'm assuming that I'd want to highlight the "Volume" and erase/reformat it and not the entire SSD so as not to erase the startup disc (i.e. I'm assuming the startup disc is at the SSD level and not the volume level...just a guess). Is this correct?

Thanks,

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH22241?locale=en_US

 

[MacUser2525]

If by startup disk you mean the recovery partition then it is never messed with by Disk Utility when erasing the partition for your install on the disk. So you want the installed partition on the SSD selected not the entire disk as then it will want to repartition/format the drive itself. Don't think it will let you do that anyways as you will be running from the Recovery partition to do this, never tried it though so cannot be certain.

Edit: Really may as well once into the recovery mode just do a fresh install being sure to erase the Macintosh HD first that is unless your set on having the new user have to do it for themselves

 

[DSTOFEL]

If by startup disk you mean the recovery partition then it is never messed with by Disk Utility when erasing the partition for your install on the disk. So you want the installed partition on the SSD selected not the entire disk as then it will want to repartition/format the drive itself. Don't think it will let you do that anyways as you will be running from the Recovery partition to do this, never tried it though so cannot be certain.

Edit: Really may as well once into the recovery mode just do a fresh install being sure to erase the Macintosh HD first that is unless your set on having the new user have to do it for themselves

Thanks for the feedback. This helps! This is about the only tricky part in the process....at least for me!!!