How To Wipe Hard Drive?

[ghsDUDE]

I'm selling my 2011 MBA today and I need to wipe the hard drive so it's "like new" for the buyer.

How do I go about doing this?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

You start up from the Lion Recovery partition and open Disk Utility and select the Macintosh HD partition and ERASE it (securely hopefully).
Mac 101: Preparing your old Mac for sale or recycling

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Links to guides on how to use Disk Utility, the application Mac OS X provides for managing internal and external HDD/SSDs and its formats.

Guide on how to use Disk Utility from the restore / installation DVD.

Using Disk Utility - Formatting, Partitioning, Verifying, and Repairing Disks

which includes:

• Format, Erase, or Reformat a Drive
• Erase or Reformat a Partition
• Add a Partition
• Deleting and Resizing Partitions
• Disk Formats

and some more guides
​

DiskWiping – One Pass is Enough​

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[flynz4]

Some of the operations take hours. You might need more than a day to secure wipe, download the OS, reinstall.

If you have already been using FV2, then your data may already be secure. Just remove your accounts (I am not 100% sure). If not, then you can probably get by with a one-pass erase if you are really strapped for time. I have typically done a 7 or higher erase... but then I am the paranoid type.

/Jim

 

[mchalebk]

On the two Macs I've sold on Craigslist, I used Disc Utility to do a 1x overwrite on the HD, then installed all the software I was including with the computer (by the time I sold them, they couldn't run the latest versions of OS, iLife and maybe some others, so I install them all and give them the discs).

Is a 1x overwrite truly secure? I'm sure it would be possible for a pro to glean some personal information, but what really are the chances that the person you're selling it to will be criminally inclined and a profession? However, when you add the new installs on top of the overwrite, I'm sure it would be hard to get much out of it.

Yes, if you're paranoid, the 7x overwrite is probably smart. It will take some time, though (maybe not too bad on a MacBook Air with the solid state drive).

 

[ghsDUDE]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

You start up from the Lion Recovery partition and open Disk Utility and select the Macintosh HD partition and ERASE it (securely hopefully).
Mac 101: Preparing your old Mac for sale or recycling

____________________________________________________________

Links to guides on how to use Disk Utility, the application Mac OS X provides for managing internal and external HDD/SSDs and its formats.

Guide on how to use Disk Utility from the restore / installation DVD.

Using Disk Utility - Formatting, Partitioning, Verifying, and Repairing Disks

which includes:

• Format, Erase, or Reformat a Drive
• Erase or Reformat a Partition
• Add a Partition
• Deleting and Resizing Partitions
• Disk Formats

and some more guides
​

DiskWiping – One Pass is Enough​

____________________________________________________________​

I got to the disc utility like it says. And when I click on the erase tab it won't let me select the security options tab.

Any way to make that pop up?