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2011 Air - How do you wipe drive to return?
- Thread starter OSMac
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You restart the MBA and hold down the OPTION key right after the startup sound to boot into the recovery partition, from where you can erase the SSD (securely).
You are 100% correct. You really want to do an SSD secure-erase. I know how to do this for other drive makes but am not sure the best method for the samsung SSD.
Unfortunately I don't believe there is a native reset tool in OS X yet.
On the upside, you don't have to do any arduous secure wiping, the encrypt then wipe is pretty fast. I would change my password to something obnoxious after encrypting, then wipe.
Filevault 2 probably does slow down the drive access since the data must be encrypted/decrypted on the fly. However... I personally think the security is worth any potential slow down.
In the past I did not use FV1 because I heard too many stories of it being unreliable. I did not like the lower level of security of an unencrypted drive because the loss of a laptop could trivially lead to identity theft. I did use some folder level vaults (Knox) for my most critical data... but that is much less convenient to use. Plus... Knox folders are not recommended to be synced across computers using programs like Dropbox etc, unless you are extremely careful not to unlock the vaults on more than one computer. I generally use the methodology that 0% of any original data lives on my MBA. Anything that would be considered original is synced via Dropbox, IMAP, etc.
With FV2, all of those problems are gone. I finally turned on disk encryption for all of our computers... and hence my data is much more secure from the loss or theft of a computer.
/Jim
Another thing you can do is create a temporary "empty" user account with admin privs. Use that account to delete all of your existing user accounts. When deleting each user account, you have the option to secure erase the user data associated with that account.
Then wipe the disk.
/Jim
Yes, but with TRIM it quickly returns to speed. Don't securely erase too often, though, since each one is a full write cycle on the entire drive, and you only have about 5,000 of them.
Encryption slows down the drive, too, but it isn't noticeable for me.
When I boot into the recovery mode the option to secure erase is greyed-out. Can anyone help? Also, is there any way to reformat and reinstall without an Internet connection?
That's a great solution, for traditional hard drives. Unfortunately this is not a good solution for SSD.
You may want to read this - it explains why it doesn't work, secure erase, for ssd.
http://arstechnica.com/ask-ars/2011/03/ask-ars-how-can-i-safely-erase-the-data-from-my-ssd-drive.ars
I thought that we cannot execute a secure erase on SSDs in the MBA. My comment was to securely delete the user accounts in conjunction with using FV2.
I set up FV2 on my MBA from the beginning... so my data has always been encrypted on the device.
/Jim
My mistake, I see what you were saying now.. there is no point in doing the secure delete on top of file vault really.. and since it's whole disk encryption now, it wouldn't really matter if you did the user account or the machine.. it would basically just add steps or time.
So full disk encrypt. Change password to something you write down like
jshdgdyeksjdhfk90sl@#$%
reboot, delete and restore. Only writing the password in case something changes and you need back in!
Bump - the secure erase option is greyed out for me too. Need to wipe the drive so I can return to best buy!
quickest way is to boot to single user mode by holding Apple-S at bootup, mount the drive, then rm -rf /
That'll do a good job of it.
That'll do a good job of it.
That is a generalized article about wiping ssd's that does not apply in this case. Creating a new admin account and securely deleting the old account uses Apples tools and OS' and works. Thats why when you delete an account you are asked if you want to securely delete it.