permanent erase?

geno galli

I want to sell my old iBook - how can I make sure that whoever buys it isn't able to recover all the stuff I threw away when I was cleaning it up? Is there a sure-fire way to wipe the hard drive clean?

xaqtly

Well there's always magnets...



But I'd suggest wiping the hard drive with Drive Setup with the Zero All Data option turned on. You'll have to boot from a system CD to do this.

allinone

If you just want to make sure that the stuff you have deleted is unrecoverable you can use "Wipe Info" that comes with Norton Utilities.



I believe there are other tools to do this but this is the one that I am familiar with.



Other World Computing has a copy of Norton for under $10.



<a href="http://eshop.macsales.com/Item_Specials.cfm?ID=3817&Item=SYM072600421"; target="_blank">http://eshop.macsales.com/Item_Specials.cfm?ID=3817&Item=SYM072600421</a>;



(Plus Retrospect + AntiVirus)





It's not the new OSX version but I haven't heard much good about that version anyway...



Hope this helps.

ghost_user_name

There's a free classic program named "Burn" that works great for just this function. It'll wipe the free space on your drives, overwriting with either ones, zeros, or a combination of both.

ghost_user_name

Here's the URL for Burn:



<a href="http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=756&db=mac"; target="_blank">http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=756&db=mac</a>;