wipe hard drive

F

fykelly

Registered
hi -

i'm not a computer genius, so I hope this doesn't sound ridiculous...
i'm trying to wipe my old hard drive for my iMac totally clean (i got a new Mac!) and i was told to go to Disk Utility to do it and hit the 'Erase' tab. That would be great if there was an 'Erase' tab, but there doesn't seem to be. There is an 'Erase Disk' option under 'Options' but I can't ever seem to get it active, even by clicking on the HD or any other place.
What am I doing wrong?
I want to donate my old mac but I want to make sure it's clean first!
also: what does writing to zeros mean and how do i do it?? do i need to do it?

thanks in advance for any help!
 
You can't erase the volume that you booted from. If you want to erase the disk that has your OS X system on it, you should boot up from the installation CD, and use the copy of Disk Utility that's available there.

Writing zeroes is a security measure, and I recommend doing it if you're going to give away your machine. Normally, when you delete a file or erase a disk, all your data stays on the disk, it's just that it's invisible and made available to be overwritten. Until it's overwritten, it might be possible to recover it using special software. Zeroing out your entire volume makes this impossible, since it overwrites all the data immediately. (Note: It MIGHT still be recoverable for professional data-recovery services, which use special hardware, but not for regular home users. If you're extra paranoid, Disk Utility also has the option to overwrite the data 7 or 35 times with random values, which should make it unrecoverable even for professionals. I think that's overkill, though.....unless you're a government spy and have top-secret mission info on your Mac, anyway.)

On OS 10.4, this option is available when you click on the "Security Options" button next to the "Erase" button. It might be in a different place if you're using an older version of OS X, but it should be right around there in Disk Utility.
 
Thanks Mikuro!
I managed to Erase the drive with the disk utility booted off the installaton disk.
I couldn't find anything anywhere that gave security options so i couldn't write to zeros. This mac is so old it is OSX 10.0.3. Any ideas as to how I can 'write to zeros' from there?

Thanks!
 
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