I'm getting ready to sell my mid 2008 macbook, I've researched & obsessed over what to do to prepare my MB. I decided to reformat the hard drive using the 2 disc that came with the MB. I put the disk in, got to disk utilities, selected the internal HD, went to erase tab, kept it at Mac OS Extended (journaled), renamed it, and chose 7 pass security erase under security options. I confirmed the erase (which took several times). It's been about 45 minutes and it still says "Preparing to securely remove data from disk." I know the 7 pass is going to take awhile, but is this normal? The drive has 111 GB.
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Secure Erase Before Selling
- Thread starter AppleJaxKid
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If you're on Snow Leopard or earlier:
If you're on Lion or later:
If you're on Lion or later:
Sounds silly, but whenever I sell a computer, i just get a new basic 250GB HD for it and install OSX on it. That way it's a completely new drive, none of my info is on there, yet the new owner gets a fresh out of the box set up. You can then use the old HD in your new computer or for backup purposes, win/win IMO.