Macintosh Plus hard disk wiping?

[hod]

My parents are downsizing and I've been helping clear the house - amongst stuff they've never chucked out are all their old computers (all Macs). The first we had when I was a kid is a Mac Plus, with an external Rodime 20MB (oooooh!) hard drive. After a fair bit of nostalgia playing with it, I'm going to eBay it for them, but my dad wants me to wipe the hard disk first. Fair enough, but doing it securely? My best answer is to delete all the files then copy other mundane things onto the hard disk so the original files are over written. Would this work?

It all runs perfectly, though I don't know how well the floppy discs will have held up 25 years on.

 

[Hrududu]

Ya that would do it. Just write as much on there as possible and thet'll do a decent job of covering up anything you "trashed". What you should do is fire up our old friend Apple HD SC Setup and erase the drive from there once you're done.

 

[hod]

Ya that would do it. Just write as much on there as possible and thet'll do a decent job of covering up anything you "trashed". What you should do is fire up our old friend Apple HD SC Setup and erase the drive from there once you're done.

Thanks for that. My only issue with then erasing the drive is relying on the system disc (6.0.4) to re-install, and I'm not sure how much I want to do that given the age of the floppy disc and the last time they were used.

 

[MacTech68]

I'll agree that deleting anything OTHER than the system folder and writing junk files over the empty space is probably the best idea.

IIRC the Rodime drives need their own special formatter program.

 

[hod]

IIRC the Rodime drives need their own special formatter program.

Ah, in that case I definitely won't erase the hard drive, I've no Rodime discs in the box.

 

[orestes1984]

Zero writing a hard drive once is enough to destroy the previous contents of the drive. Just filling up the hard drive with junk and then erasing it will be close to good enough in terms of writing over it. Just don't delete the system folder or anything in the applications folder you don't wont to get rid of.