Recommended means of restoring?

[Gofre]

Hi guys,

So yeah, I've just sold my 2010 MacBook Pro in order to make the move to a Mac Mini, so I need to restore it to factory settings before shipping it tomorrow. I was just wondering what the correct procedure would be to achieve this, ensuring nothing on the HDD is recoverable? I assume it's just a case of reformatting the hard drive then booting from the install disk, just wanted to make sure I'm not missing anything else out.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

[charlituna]

The only way to be certain nothing can be recovered is to destroy the hard drive. But that's costly since you'd have to replace the drive etc.


So the best you can do is to make it damn near impossible to utterly annoying to recover anything.

Assuming that the MBP has a recovery partition, boot to that and go to disk utility. erase the drive with the security options on for 'most secure'. you could, if you are really paranoid, fill it up with a bunch of junk files and erase it, repeat 3-4 times just overwriting with the junk (I have friends that use folders of celeb photos off the web for that kind of thing). Always at 'most secure'.

Then reinstall Lion into the main drive. When it is finished just shut down the machine and it should open to the Set Up Assistant screens for the new owner

 

[Edie Brickell]

Use Erase option in disk utility or use a disk wipe software which can permanently erase your data from your hard drive beyond any recovery process.