Why do Macs (desktop and notebooks) appear to have two harddrives?
I'm erasing the harddrive of my old Macbook (unibody 2009) in preparation for sale, using the secure erase 7 pass method. Doing this brings up a question I've had for a long time. On disk utility, it appears as if there are two distinct harddrives. In my case the list looks like:
Both the "Toshiba" and the "Macintosh HD" drives can be worked on (error check and fix, etc.), and they seem like they're two different drives. But they obviously cannot be. Or are they?
The reason this is important now is for security reasons. I'm reformatting the Mac HD drive, but do I also have to reformat the "Toshiba" drive? I'm worried that perhaps all my data will remain on the Toshiba, and if a good enough nerd buys my macbook, he/she can access all my data.
Thanks.
One is the actual drive and will typically show the name of the hardware. The other is the partition on the drive. If you had more than one partition, you would see them all listed. If you did have multiple partitions, wiping any single one of them would leave the others intact. It's generally a good idea to wipe at the drive level as this will destroy any data on the drive. As you only have one partition, you should be fine. However, there could be some circumstances where data would remain with this method. It's not likely they would apply to you unless you have created/deleted additional partitions at some time. It is possible to simply delete a partition. When doing so, the data is not actually wiped and can potentially be recovered. I don't know the size of your Macintosh HD partition. If it is about the same size as your Toshiba drive, they you're probably fine. I would still recommend wiping from the drive level.
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