Restoring disk after Apple replaces it in recall

Hi, I confess I am not a mac user. I have just slipped in here to ask for some help. My brother (3000 miles away) has a recall on his hard disk. He has a very poor understanding of anything computer. The notice from Apple (I read it) says they will only restore his OS and apps that are on disks that he brings in. People keep telling him that time machine will restore the system. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the common use of the term in the community are actually saying data will be restored; not what I view as the system (e.g., everything on the disk needed to create a new system on a bare disk).

The problems. My brother does not want to lose all his settings and aps in the exchange. He had a hard enough time getting it the way it is. He really really does not understand. He called me because of concern for the data on his old drive being left on the drive. Having seen multiple occurrences of unerased drives showing up or techs browsing them, I have advised him to erase the drive before taking it in for an exchange.

Now the root problem: I have never touched a mac. My research so far indicates that there is a Drive Utility application in the OS that will make and restore actual complete systems backups. I have found the procedure for that using his external drive.

What I still need is a way to erase the internal drive. Is there an application available to securely erase the drive. By secure I mean it writes over the entire disk with some pattern of data to positively block any ability to find old data. He says he has version 10.8.2 of the OS.

If someone can validate the idea of using DU and point me to an erase application I would greatly appreciate it. Or if I have the wrong approach.

Unless system files are excluded Time Machine will include them in the backup and most things will install correctly though **** possible some things that need to be reinstalled. The Time Machine backup will not be directly bootable. You must boot from either the recovery partition or a boot DVD (depending on OS version) then restore from the backup.

I would probably use something like Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner to create an exact clone of the existing drive (if it is still functional). Clone it onto an external drive. Once the new drive is installed you should be able to boot from the external drive and clone from the external drive back to the new internal drive.

Note When you clone things to the external drive boot from it at least once just to make sure you can. You can do this by holding down the option key and selecting the external drive from the list.

If his Mac is running OS X 10.7 or 10.8i use Carbon Copy Cloner to do the cloning since it copies the recovery partition properly. You could use Disc Utility to make the "clone" as you suggested but it will not clone the recovery partition. It can be used to erase a drive As far as erasing goes check out this article. Pay particular attention to the information about erasing a drive.