Wiping Macbook Pro

[musical87]

Hi all,

Going to be selling my Macbook Pro 13 to a friend and want to wipe it clean before I hand it over. There's nothing really at all on it that wont fit on a USB stick eg. documents its just some extra software so I want to return it to stock apps and a fresh system.

Had a look at how to do the wipe and seem to find different views. The Macbook Pro came pre installed with Lion so I dont have any software discs. I believe (from what I've read) you hold the option key down at startup and boot into the recovery disk. Im just wondering if anyone can confirm this is right and which option to choose from that to wipe the laptop but leave Lion intact.

Thanks in advance!

 

[w00t951]

Restart with the option key held down. Select the Recovery HD, and then select Disk Utility. Pick your HDD (not a partition, eg. Macintosh HD, the drive, eg. TOSHIBA) and click "Erase," then pick "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)." Type the drive name that you want. Don't pick Case Sensitive, or you might have issues installing some apps like Adobe Photoshop.

If you really want to be precise, select "Security Options" and use the slider to decide how secure you want Disk Utility to erase your files. It'll also increase the time required exponentially.

Quit Disk Utility, then click Install OS X, and select your newly erased disk.

 

[musical87]

Thanks very much!

 

[klover]

I find that creating a new user (Administrative) and then deleting your old account using secure erase is much, much faster. No disks or network access needed either.