Selling Mac - Security questions

[AJP123]

Hi everyone,

First, not sure if this is the right forum for my question, so if a mod could move this id necessary, that'd be great .

I'm wanting to sell my 8 week old mac mini, but I'm not sure what security precautions I should take. It's running lion, so i could reinstall from the recovery petition. However, ideally I'd like to wipe it securely, then boot from a USB Stick with lion on it. However, It came out preinstalled with Lion, so I'm not sure if it's possible to even make a bookable reinstallation USB Stick. Any help here?

Also, it's a 2.5Ghz current gen Mac Mini, with all the cables, Office for Mac family pack, keyboard, mouse, appeared, and that's it, I think. It retailed for AU$1400, trying to resell for AU$650. Is that reasonable?

Is there anything else I should keep in mind, when selling it, from a security point of view or otherwise?

Thankyou!

 

[Confuzzzed]

Make sure you wipe the Hard drive properly. The first thing to do is de-authorise the computer. Then you start the process of wiping.

You do this by booting into the partition by keeping Alt key whilst the machine is booting until you see Macintosh HD on the left.

That takes you into Recovery hard drive. Choose language. Then from top menu bar select Disc utility. From there select Erase (I think it's the 3rd option down). Before you click the Erase button, I suggest that you click the nearby Security Options button.

Here you have a couple of options, each of which is progressively more secure than the previous. I decided to go for the 7-pass erase, which took about 5 hours to do!! Apparently it met the now obsolete US Department of Defense 5220-22M standard for securely erasing magnetic media by erasing the drive index files and writing over the data seven times. This hasn't been the standard since 2007 but if it was good enough for the Pentagon, then it's good enough for me!!

 

[GGJstudios]

Mac 101: Preparing your old Mac for sale or recycling

Check Mac2Sell, eBay, or Amazon for prices of equivalent models, to get an idea of what you may be able to charge.