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Zeroing drives

I

iPat

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 21, 2002
41
0
I'm about to sell an iBook 700Mhz and would like to zero the drive (overwrite the entire drive) before shipping. My problem is I can't get Drive Utility to let me do it on the drive (the option is blocked out). I am able to do it to a firewire drive I have. I have tried booting from the OSX CD and using Drive utility that way and it still doesn't work. My first question is can you still zero a drive with OSX on it using Drive Utility and are there better applications to zero drives? Thank you.

iPat
 
i've been wondering about this myself. i heard that starting with 10.2.3, diskutility allowed you to zero a drive, but if you wanted to zero and install 10.2, you would have to make a 10.2.3 cd with bootcd, zero the drive, find some way to make the computer eject the cd, and then start up from the 10.2 cd. if there is some way to boot from a cd and then have the computer eject it, this process would not be that bad, but as it stands, it seems like you would have to zero the drive with the os9 cd, install os9, then install osx (but what if i don't want os9?). what is the easiest way to zero a drive and install osx only?
 
tucows.com
There are a few file utilities here of the sort your looking for.


This one, Burn , works in Classic Mode only. Its good. It offers all 0’s,1’s, or random, and will cycle up to 14 times. Its freeware.

An old school way of "zero-ing" a drive is to create large files and fill the drive, and then erase them. It's not perfect, but if it will do in most cases. A giant text file or other file should work.

If you really want to get sneaky, degauss the drive, but I don't think that computer, nor the person that is receiving the computer would appreciate that. (The drive will be randomized, and permently unusable.) If you do go that rout, take off your watch. ;)
 
Used BootCd to make a bootable image of 10.2.4 and then used DiskUtility. Worked great.

Thanks for the advice
 
I don't remember if I just pressed the eject button or if I turned it off then back on and pressed the eject button. I am 85% sure I just pressed the eject button and the drive opened. Whatever I did it wasn't at all a problem as I don't remember doing it.

Pat
 
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