"Erasing" Personal Info from IMAC before gifting it

[bobherr]

Hi - I have an old IMAC that I haven't used in years and there is a non profit organization that wants it. Does anyone know how to get rid of all of my personal info on it before we give it away?
Thanks,
Bob

 

[JoshuaJay]

It should have come with some discs when you bought the machine.

Erase and Restore discs I believe they are called.

Simply back up any info you want to save, then use those discs. Once you've restored it, it will be 'out of the box' new.

If you don't have these discs, this is an option:

You can create a new user account and simply delete the old one, but that would still require manually deleting any personal files in your home directory.

 

[Kharn]

It should have come with some discs when you bought the machine.

Prity much this, but I the select disk utility or disk tools and select erase drive

 

[thunderdome]

I would personally do a clean install, wiping the drive clean by doing so. What iMac are you talking about? If its an older G3 iMac and you dont have the restore discs, you might have a tough time finding OS 9 discs to clean it up. If its a G4 iMac, you can install OS 10.4, I think thats the latest version of OS X it can install, and those are easier to come by then OS 9.

 

[Kharn]

I would personally do a clean install, wiping the drive clean by doing so. What iMac are you talking about? If its an older G3 iMac and you dont have the restore discs, you might have a tough time finding OS 9 discs to clean it up. If its a G4 iMac, you can install OS 10.4, I think thats the latest version of OS X it can install, and those are easier to come by then OS 9.

OSX has a data erase utility much like Dban, a clean install might remove the data but it has not been over written and can still be recovered.

 

[thunderdome]

OSX has a data erase utility much like Dban, a clean install might remove the data but it has not been over written and can still be recovered.

Yes, if your serious about deleting your data you need to zero out the hard drive before an install. It all depends on how secure and paranoid you are about the info you have on there getting hacked.

I just swap hard drives when I sell a machine, I am a pack rat so never really delete a hard drive, just pull it and put a new one in, they are cheap.

 

[35g700]

The best way to erase you data would be to preform a clean install of OS X. You should have gotten an OS X install disk with your iMac. To do this you simply insert the disk and hold down the option key after pressing the power button. Then select to boot from the optical disk rather than the hard drive. Once the iMac has booted from the OS X install disk you can quit out of the OS X installer and open up disk utility from the utilities menu. From there select the hard drive in the computer and select the erase tab. Click the security options button and from there you can chose to zero out the data, do a 7 pass erase or a 35 pass erase. Afterwards quit out of disk utility and install Mac OS X.