Formatting Hard Drive

[PS65]

My MBP is being replace tomorrow and I need to wipe the HDD.

I know I can zero out the data or 7 wipe it, but I don't have enough time to do a 7 wipe.

Any way of wiping the internal HDD, say, 3 times (ie. American Military Standard)?

 

[Detrius]

Sure. Tell it to do 7, and then stop it at three.

And for the vast vast majority of people, zeroing the data is good enough. Yes, data can be recovered in theory, but even wiping the drive with random data 7 times, the data can potentially still be recovered. The only sure-fire way to make sure someone can't get your data is to destroy the drive. If you don't care enough to destroy the drive, then you probably don't actually need to worry about anything more than zeroing the drive, since there's no consumer software that can recover data from a zeroed drive (that I'm aware of, anyway).

 

[Mersailios]

You can perform a three pass zero-fill of the disk or perform a three pass US DoE erase, whichever you prefer -- a three pass zero-fill is usually sufficient.

WARNING: Ensure that you've disconnected any external storage devices before performing the instructions below, as this will destroy any data on the target disk. To view a list of the connected disks and partitions on your computer, execute diskutil list from the Terminal.

1. Boot from your Mac OS X Install DVD.
2. Select the language you wish to use.
3. From the Utilities menu, choose "Terminal".
4. Type the following command if you wish to perform a three pass zero-fill:
   

   diskutil secureErase 0 disk0; diskutil secureErase 0 disk0; diskutil secureErase 0 disk0

5. Press Enter/Return to execute the command.
6. Type the following command if you wish to perform a three pass US DoE erase:
   

   diskutil secureErase 4 disk0

7. Press Enter/Return to execute the command.

Hope that helps, have a great day!

 

[PS65]

Thanks, Mersailios!

FYI - Apple appears to have changed the format settings in Disk Utility. It now has the option to use a slider and do 3 passes.

 

[Mersailios]

Thanks, Mersailios!

FYI - Apple appears to have changed the format settings in Disk Utility. It now has the option to use a slider and do 3 passes.

No problem! I was unaware of the slider to control the number of passes in Disk Utility, are you using Lion?

 

[PS65]

No problem! I was unaware of the slider to control the number of passes in Disk Utility, are you using Lion?

Yep - running Lion. It must be one of the 'features' Apple added to their list of updates!