On Wednesday, Sep 24, 2003, at 22:05 US/Eastern, Ray Sleeva wrote:
What would be the best way to prep the hard drive of a Mac running
OS X that you are about the sell?
Sure, you delete the users with their data, but what about the owner
(administrator)? You can delete the data but not the name.
Is the owners name easy for the buyer to change?
The hard drive could be wiped and the OS reinstalled, but you still have
to give it an administrator name before you can run the OS.
What has everyone been doing?
Ray
If you've ever stored any sensitive information (credit card numbers, etc.) on the computer, I would recommend wiping the drive completely. You can buy programs to do that, or do it yourself.
For an adequate level of protection (i.e. Joe Sixpack couldn't recover anything, but the NSA could), reinstall the OS, then in a terminal window do this:
dd if=/dev/zero of=zerofile
This will create a file which will fill the rest of the drive. The file will contain all zeros. When that command completes, do this:
rm zerofile
To erase the file. There is a possibility the computer will hang if the drive is filled completely, if so, try booting into single user mode, or, just reinstall the OS.
By filling the drive with all zeros in a file, you should eliminate the possibility that someone can recover any deleted files from the drive, or read information lying around in unused blocks on the drive.
To be more thorough, you should probably zero the whole drive. I'll boot from my install DVD and see if this is possible (hopefully I won't zero my drive :-))
HTH
Regards, JJ
Be Kind, Be Careful, Be Yourself
-- The iMac List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and...
Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | - Epson Stylus Color 580 Printers - new at $69 | & CDRWs on Sale! |
Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html>
iMac List info: <http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/imac-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/>
---------------------------------------------------------------
The Think Different Store
http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
