Hello. My son no longer has a Mac and has offered me his 1TB Time Capsule providing I secure erase it for him. I can't afford to have my Mac connected for up to several days using at least a 3-pass secure erase. (Even more secure if possible.)

And I'm new to Mac world. I do know how to do this task using Airport utilities, while my Mac remains connected to the TC. But I just can't afford to tie my Macbook Pro up longer than maybe a half-day while this completes.

I have been unable to find a way to tell TC to secure erase itself using multiple passes from its own CPU cycles with my Macbook Pro totally disconnected.

Has anyone else done this or have any ideas?

Thank you. Valuable info here - first place I go to read about my issues/resolutions.

Hello. My son no longer has a Mac and has offered me his 1TB Time Capsule providing I secure erase it for him. I can't afford to have my Mac connected for up to several days using at least a 3-pass secure erase. (Even more secure if possible.)

What's the point provided the Time Capsule will be in your possession? It's not like you'll be able to access the data after its been reformatted without at least purchasing consumer grade data recovery software. Eventually as you over write data to it there will be no chance of recovering anything from it. Also, zeroing the drive for a single pass is plenty adequate enough and should only maybe take about half a day. Anything more than that is just pretty much shortening the drives life span anyway.

Try the Airport Utility for Windows (http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1391) to see if you can manage it to erase it.