11-09-2011, 07:41 PM

Hi I bought a new Macbook air a few weeks ago and have realised after several visits to my local "Genius Bar" that it does not have a big enough memory for my needs. On my last visit to the "Genius Bar" I asked how to delete my information off in order to sell it and was told to start it up holding command and R and after doing that and following the instructions it hasn't deleted my information. Does anyone have an idiot guide for deleting my information and returning the computer to a new like state.

Thanks soo much for any help

11-09-2011, 08:05 PM

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/buy...ac-resale.html

11-09-2011, 08:21 PM

Personally, I usually su to root (why not enable root if you are nuking the system anyhow?) and cp -pr the contents of the /bin directory to a new directory I create called /zzz in terminal.app. Since commands like rm generally run from 0-9 & a-z, the /zzz directory will likely be one of the last directories removed and thus run for much longer than if you run it from /bin. The rm command and it's dependencies will theoretically be some of the last files deleted from the disk. Anyhow, from there I run /zzz/rm -drf /* (or to be really thorough: rm -drfP, though it sometimes just dies with the P flag). You can do other variations, like rm -drf /*.* or whatever. Eventually, after a really long time, the system will just quit running and will be pretty tough for anyone to recover without some serious effort. Once it's unbootable, you can boot to recovery mode off of the recovery partition and use whatever erase options (depending upon your level of paranoia) in Disk Utility to overwrite what was on the disk. Some folks like to boot off a Linux flash drive and just format over the whole disk or write out the contents of /dev/random to the disk, but that's a bit more involved sometimes.

11-09-2011, 08:32 PM

Originally Posted by XJ-linux

Personally, I usually su to root (why not enable root if you are nuking the system anyhow?) and cp -pr the contents of the /bin directory to a new directory I create called /zzz in terminal.app. Since commands like rm generally run from 0-9 & a-z, the /zzz directory will likely be one of the last directories removed and thus run for much longer than if you run it from /bin. The rm command and it's dependencies will theoretically be some of the last files deleted from the disk. Anyhow, from there I run /zzz/rm -drf /* (or to be really thorough: rm -drfP, though it sometimes just dies with the P flag). You can do other variations, like rm -drf /*.* or whatever. Eventually, after a really long time, the system will just quit running and will be pretty tough for anyone to recover without some serious effort. Once it's unbootable, you can boot to recovery mode off of the recovery partition and use whatever erase options (depending upon your level of paranoia) in Disk Utility to overwrite what was on the disk. Some folks like to boot off a Linux flash drive and just format over the whole disk or write out the contents of /dev/random to the disk, but that's a bit more involved sometimes.

You big geek! LOL

Maybe a little advanced for our OP looking for an idiot guide

11-10-2011, 03:53 AM

Thanks guys for your quick responses - I followed the first option and created a new user but appreciate both reply's