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How to prepare my MBP HDD with Lion for Sale?

ajcadoo

ajcadoo

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 17, 2011
279
191
San Diego, CA
I am planning to sell my MBP this month for the new 2012 design.

What I want to do is backup the drive and then erase my current HDD by doing a 7-Pass erase. However, if I do this, will it also erase the capabilities to reinstall Lion by holding Command-R during the boot up cycle?

I am afraid to erase my HDD and then not have an OS on it at all.

Any help would be great!
 
I would add a new dummy user account then boot to that account. Then remove you own account while in the dummy account. Now start Disk Util and do a secure erase of free space. That will only erase free space and not the OS.

Unless you have secret nuclear codes on there, you are good with a one pass erase.
 
7 Pass would take forever. I've done 1 pass on drives and ended up canceling after an hour because of frustration. Of course, I'm not selling those. I do think 1 pass would be good enough.

Do you have a copy of Lion already? If not, I THINK you can download it from the MAS. Do all that and put it on a flash drive before erasing your HDD.

Install it and make sure the recovery partition is installed. Then boot from the recovery partition and reinstall Lion. Do a cmd+q during the setup screen to turn it off and leave a fresh install of Lion on.

Honestly though, I'm not sure if this will still tie that installation to your Apple ID, or even if Lion does get tied to it. If not, you might be able to skip that 2nd installation.
 
Use Darik's Boot and Nuke to wipe your HDD clean and then reinstall vanilla Lion on it using Internet Recovery.
 
If you have a macbook that came with lion preinstalled then cmd+r will start recovery from the firmware. No matter what you do to the hard drive you will be able to download and install Lion...even if you erase the recovery partition.

If you bought Lion from the MAS then you'll need to either update from the app store or boot from an external device.
 
BL4zD said:
If you have a macbook that came with lion preinstalled then cmd+r will start recovery from the firmware. No matter what you do to the hard drive you will be able to download and install Lion...even if you erase the recovery partition.

If you bought Lion from the MAS then you'll need to either update from the app store or boot from an external device.
Click to expand...

I thought I saw on here there's a firmware update to get that functionality on older MacBooks. So anything from 2010 I believe can have this feature.
 
Lion adds a hidden partition for the restore (About 600MB) so you can just run a 2 pass wipe on your partition form Disk utility (by holding Option) then install Lion and sell it.
 
Or… just make a bootable USB stick and use that to format/erase your drive and do a clean install? That is the easiest of the bunch.
 
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