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How to wipe your HARD drive - Macintosh


Product Supported Platforms Options Web Site
Burn OS 8.5 and the new Mac OS HFS+ file system Free http://www.thenextwave.com/burnHP.html
Eraser Pro Minimum OS 7 Free http://users.libero.it/yellowsoft/theeraser.html
ShredIt Minimum OS 8 Purchase http://www.mireth.com/text/shredit_sp.html
PGP Wipe Utility & Wipe Free Space OS X 10.3.9 ("Panther") 10.4.0 through 10.4.4 ("Tiger") Free trial or purchase http://www.pgp.com/products/desktop/index.html

Note:
How To Wipe Your Drive does not warrant or endorse any of the products listed herein. Professional advice, services and guarantees should be sought where data is considered confidential or of high value. How To Wipe Your Drive thanks and acknowledges the University of Minnesota for their contribution to this site.

How to Erase a Macintosh Hard Drive

Disk Utility

To completely erase a Macintosh hard drive that runs OS X 10.3.x or above—not just individual files on the drive—you can use the Disk Utility that is built into the Macintosh operating system.

IMPORTANT
Erasing a hard drive deletes all the volumes and files on the drive. Therefore, before you erase the hard drive, if you want to keep files on the drive, copy them to a form of external media (e.g., a Zip disk or a CD).

By default, Disk Utility erases only the information used to access the files, not the data in the files themselves. Therefore, the erased files can be recovered. If you need to erase a disk so that the files cannot be recovered, you can select security options within the utility to do so (i.e., write zeros over the disk space).

How to Use Disk Utility to Erase a Macintosh Hard Drive (OS X 10.3.x or 10.4.x)

1. You must reboot your computer using the OS X system CD that came with your Macintosh. To do so, follow these steps:
  • Insert the CD into the CD drive.
  • Hold down the C key during the startup process.

2. Select your preferred language. You will then see the Welcome to the Mac OS X Installer window.

3. From the Installer Menu Bar, click Open Disk Utility. You will then see the Disk Utility window.

4. In the left pane of the Disk Utility window, click the drive you want to erase.

5. In the right pane of the Disk Utility window, click the Erase tab.

6. From the Volume Format drop-down menu, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

7. In the Name field, highlight the existing text and type the name the hard drive is to be called after it's formatted.

8. NOTE: If you ever plan to connect another computer running OS 9 to this hard drive, you'll want to install the Mac OS 9 disk driver, so that this disk will be visible from an OS 9-booted computer. If you don't know if you will do this in the future, it's best to install these drivers.

9. The following are the available security options:

  • Don't Erase Data— NOT SECURE - This option only rewrites the headers on the disk. Files can be recovered by forensics, disk utilities, and other advanced recovery software.
  • Zero Out Data— SECURE for most commercial use - There are forensics utilities that in theory could retrieve some data however they are extremely expensive and time consuming and there are no documented cases of this actually taking place.
  • 7-Pass Erase— SECURE for up to Secret - This is considered sufficient by government standards to erase data from a disk. It writes random data over the disk seven times. It may take several hours or more to complete this process.
  • 35-Pass Erase— SECURE for even the theorists - This makes it absolutely impossible to regain any data off the drive. This option takes an extremely long time, possibly more than one day.

10. Click the radio button in front of 7-Pass Erase

11. Click OK.

12. Click Erase.

13. Confirm you want to erase. The program will unmount the volume, partition the drive, and rename the volume to the name you typed in step #7 above.


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