Restoring 2011 macbook air back to factory settings - which option?

[Z3man]

hi all,

newbie from england here.

great forums these, found loads of good info out, except this question.

i am looking at restoring my recently purchased macbook air back to its factory settings. i have rebooted it using cmd + R and gone into disk utility. then my intention was to erase the hard drive, but i have noticed there are two options, one to erase the hard drive and one to erase the SSD, can anyone tell my which one i am supposed to erase please.


thanks

 

[simsaladimbamba]

You have to erase the partition (I guess you call it "hard drive") called "Macintosh HD" (unless you renamed it), where Mac OS X resides on.
It is the slightly indented volume below the actual SSD.

 

[Z3man]

thanks, that was what i thought, but when it gave me the option to erase the SSD it confused me. what would happen if i chose the option to wipe the SSD, is it not the same thing.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

thanks, that was what i thought, but when it gave me the option to erase the SSD it confused me. what would happen if i chose the option to wipe the SSD, is it not the same thing.

The SSD (or HDD) is the actual device to store files, which can contain several partitions, one partition for the OS, the other partition for the recovery of Lion.
Like in the image below, you see the "OCZ Vertex 2", which is the actual device, then the partition titled "iMac SSD". If you erase the device, you will delete the Lion recovery partition. If you just format (erase) the partition, you will just format that partition.

ignore the "Erase Free Space" button

 

[Z3man]

thanks very much for your time that clears it up, i will just erase the hard drive. i am quite surprised apple even give you the option the erase the SSD then, i would have thought it would have been greyed out.