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How To Prepare a Mac For Sale

danbenjamin.com

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Re: How To Prepare a Mac For Sale

#11

Post by kylec »

KevinBongart wrote: post #8

There's still a problem about the "factory fresh" feeling : when you turn a brand new Mac on for the first time, you also have iLife already installed. I always specify to people I sell my Mac to that iLife is ready. Here's how to complete the "factory fresh effect" : - When you have just shut the computer down after the introduction video, reboot it in Target Mode pressing cmd-T (hey, you're not already selling a un…

The install disks that came with my MacBook (bought last August) had the ability to install iLife with the rest of the operating system, so before you get tricky with FireWire, you should check to see if the program is on the install DVDs.

Re: How To Prepare a Mac For Sale

#13

Post by cconstantine »

pmjordan wrote: post #4
lallysingh wrote: post #2

They mention zeroing out the disk to prevent the next owner from recovering your data.. actually using a 7 pass method. How does this apply to SSDs? While I suppose a global use increment by 7 isn't terrible, it does make me cringe a little.

While SSDs do wear out, it's very rare to actually end up with enough bad blocks to run out of spare space. The write limit comes up whenever you mention SSDs, but on a desktop or laptop computer it seems to be pretty much irrelevant. I do have to wonder why people still recommend 7-pass zeroing of hard disks when The Great Zero Challenge http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117588 still stands, and there is no eviden…

I've heard people with more paranoida than sense claim that recovery labs (like, say, in the NSA) can 'peel' off passes. Effectively they can view he state of a given drive sector after N writes. If you do complete passes of writing zeroes (or even random numbers), the theory is the spooks can still view your stuff.

To counter this people have written disk cleaning utilities that will write random values to a random subset of the disk each pass. After a few passes of writing randoms to a random subset (say 50% of the sectors) it becomes REALLY hard to know what was on the disk because there is no way to 'peel' off a layer.

Practical speaking... if you're defending yourself against someone with the ability and motivation to do more than a simple Norton undelete there are better options. I believe the standard practice for Defense contractors is to pass a magnetizing wand over the drives then throw them into a massive shredder.

All of this is way overkill for a person who wants to erase their online passwords and letters to mistresses.

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