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Can't believe it!!!

Asclepio

Asclepio

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 11, 2011
718
315
New brand MBA air of my friend (just arrived yesterday) , screen saver on, i pressed a key to resume, the computer ask me the password... ok.
I shut down, turn on it and press option, boot for RECOVERY PARTITION:
in to DISK UTILITY - Selected the HDD and ERASED... and it erased the entire Hard Drive without ask me password, itunes account or whatever!!!
It was system error or what?
This is INSANE.
 
That's no different than walking up to any post 1999 Mac with a Mac OS Installation dvd, booting from it, and erasing the drive.
 
Wow this is most secure system on earth... it can been erased in 2 steps "without any physical support" good to know.:eek:
 
Asclepio said:
New brand MBA air of my friend (just arrived yesterday) , screen saver on, i pressed a key to resume, the computer ask me the password... ok.
I shut down, turn on it and press option, boot for RECOVERY PARTITION:
in to DISK UTILITY - Selected the HDD and ERASED... and it erased the entire Hard Drive without ask me password, itunes account or whatever!!!
It was system error or what?
This is INSANE.
Click to expand...

Did your friend ask you to erase the hard drive on their brand new MBA? If you were messing around with my computer and did that you wouldn't be a friend of mine for very long.
 
Lion askin your itunes account for reinstall the OS and didn't asking nothing for erase it??
with all this story of only digital download, security, no dvd drive blah blah.. it seem simple STUPID.
The MBA was brand new he didn't lost any data anyway.
 
Taz Mangus said:
Did your friend ask you to erase the hard drive on their brand new MBA? If you were messing around with my computer and did that you wouldn't be a friend of mine for very long.
Click to expand...

^^^^This is what i was wondering while reading your post. Care to enlighten us?
 
Yeah! How dare Apple add a recovery partition to make clean installs and recovery easier! The bastards.

:rolleyes:

Also, pretty sure it didn't erase the entire HD. That would be like trying to eat yourself.
 
This can be done easily on any computer that doesn't have some sort of firmware password (open firmware, bios, efi, etc). Set one and there's no more worries.
 
SideStepSociety said:
Yeah! How dare Apple add a recovery partition to make clean installs and recovery easier! The bastards.

:rolleyes:

Also, pretty sure it didn't erase the entire HD. That would be like trying to eat yourself.
Click to expand...

Pretty sure it only deleted the directory structure.
So if the guy is quick and not cheap Data Recovery maybe possible.
Friendship recovery is going to be much much harder.
 
Intell said:
That's no different than walking up to any post 1999 Mac with a Mac OS Installation dvd, booting from it, and erasing the drive.
Click to expand...
Actually, I believe you wouldn't need any installation media on OS X at all. You could just into single-user mode and delete everything you want, couldn't you? In any case, you can definitely make the system unusable and delete user data - which in effect is no less of a problem to the user.

Asclepio said:
Your right, this story of Recovery Partition is the STUPID thing that apple made.
Click to expand...
The recovery partition helps users to reinstall their system, restore, and possibly salvage files without needing installation media. That's a good thing in my book. Granted, because it works with a nice shiny GUI, it makes deleting things easier. Albeit only slightly so.

But as I said, deleting "everything" on a Mac is nothing that hasn't been quite easily possible before* - provided you have physical access to the machine and no firmware password is set.

I could tell you in literally two or three sentences how to startup any Mac OS X installation and delete any data you wanted.
 
Last edited:
If you have PHYSICAL ACCESS to a computer, you can do anything with it, no matter how well it's protected. You could simply remove the hard drive and throw it out the window, in 2 simple steps.

To really protect your data, encrypt it. People will still be able to erase it, but they can't access it. Have an off-site backup to avoid such problems.

To avoid people booting your computer, set an EFI password that won't allow running anything on it or booting anything (not even the OS install disk). They can still physically take out your hard drive, though.

Computer security is generally not made to protect against people who have access to your computer.
 
baryon said:
You could simply remove the hard drive and throw it out the window, in 2 simple steps.
Click to expand...
An even simpler 1-step solution would be: Throw the whole computer out the window. :p

baryon said:
Have an off-site backup
Click to expand...
Which Time Machine, being Apple's own backup solution, isn't really, I might add. Especially if stored in the same physical location as the computer (same room/apartment/house) and backups are made only once in a while...

A combination of a small USB drive and something like Dropbox or iCloud can work well for important files that one currently works on on the go (college paper/thesis, etc.). If it's sensitive data, there's still the issue of trust and access by others, so one might want to encrypt it.
 
Warning: Geezer "going down memory lane" alert...

This whole thread reminds me of the late 70's, early 80's when retailers like walmart sold PC's (the DOS days). My friend would go into all the demos, boot into another partition and format the "C:" drive rendering them all useless. It wasn't long after that when retailers finally protected them via firmware security.
 
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