Sell iMac - need to restore without disc
I bought my iMac used and it did not come with a restore disc. Now I want to sell it, but I want to permanently remove all of my personal stuff, i.e photos, documents, etc. How do I permanently erase all of these items?
halo,
So if I hook it up to my eMac and go through the security options that would take care of it more permanently than just moving stuff to the trash?
Well read through this:
http://www.apple.com/au/support/imac/repairextensionprogram/
The pertinent info is:
"The 7-Pass Erase option conforms to the DoD 5220.22-M specification. This specification calls for three passes, but Disk Utility performs seven."
So that's 2.333 times what the Department of Defense considers standard security erasure.
Altho' now I see that they no longer consider that secure:
"As of the June 2007 edition of the DSS C&SM, overwriting is no longer acceptable for sanitization of magnetic media; only degaussing or physical destruction is acceptable."
However it should be ok for your stuff as long as there's no nuclear secrets on there.
And is it pretty easy to do it that way?
Well I did a small 20 GB hard drive and it took at least 5 hours for the 7 pass.
Richard
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