Selling MBA, how do I reformat/clear contents? Thanks!!

[phatjoe]

Hello:

I have some folks interested in purchasing my macbook air.

I'd prefer to completely reformat, but I don't have a superdrive, and/or access to another computer to remote share.

I will cut and paste all my personal content (e.g. pictures, documents) to an external drive.

What other steps can I take to completely wipe out the contents? Is it possible to remove any trace of the websites I visited?

I want to remove office 2008. Do I simply remove the application icon from the Application folder?

Any other suggestions is GREATLY appreciated!!

Thanks,

PJ

 

[Luigi239]

Honestly, your drive won't be safe until you do a reformat. Anybody who wanted to could easily snatch all the data, deleted or not off of your drive. You should really try and borrow a friends computer so that you can boot from the OS X disk and zero out your drive. If you can't do that, you should delete all your files by secure emptying the trash, by going to Finder>Secure Empty Trash in the menu bar.

Good luck

 

[RainForRent]

Yes, booting from the OSX disc and running Disk Utility will let you zero out the drive, and effectively erase your data.

 

[showtime]

When you reformat your drive it'll completely erase everything and restore the computer to factory settings. If your really paranoid about your data being recovered just change the pass although it will take a lot longer to reformat.

 

[Vikz]

remember to make it a 7 zero pass, so everything in your harddrive is protected properly

 

[PeterO]

Here's a very good precis on data sanitizing methodology. Albeit geared for a techie audience, I think it's readable for the interested layperson (or Prosumer, if you will), and at the very least, it highlights the relative spectrum of 'deleting'. From the Trash Bin to the Paranoid (loony) Bin, it's presented.

This sets-up the precis
http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/CmrrSecureEraseProtocols.pdf

There's some overlap from above but this article has greater relevance starting on page 5:
http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/DataSanitizationTutorial.pdf

You can find more content here:
http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml


As it relates to your MBA, I'm not sure I can give you a detailed recipe to erase your user data to a degree higher than running a multipass zeroing that was suggested earlier. Lack of an optical drive still throws me. Piggybacking another Mac's optical drive gets flaky when mounting or booting to non-Leopard OS's. Temporarily removing the drive from the MBA and installing it in an external enclosure or standalone tower for erasure isn't practical. Perhaps others can help....


.

 

[RainForRent]

That blasted MBA doesn't even have Firewire... I was just about to suggest Target Disk Mode. This is really bugging me.

 

[alphaod]

Do you have the SSD or the HDD?