Is there anyway to completely wipe a mac's harddrive without the OS X discs?

[leglez]

I recently traded for a stolen Macbook and am giving it back but want to wipe the hdd and get all my data off of it first. Here is a topic discussing the situation I am in. I am looking for either a Command line code or a program or killdisc or something

 

[TheStu]

Ok, you dont have the discs... do you have an external drive?

If you do, then you can hook it up, either wipe it or create a partition on it, download Carbon Copy Cloner, clone your Tiger to the external.

Then, open up System Preferences, go to Startup Disk and select the external as your boot disk. Now, restart the machine, it will boot to teh external, use this to format the MacBook, and then you can use any other machine to format the external.

 

[timswim78]

Just download DBAN. http://dban.sourceforge.net/

 

[Kadarin]

This is a stupid question, but... If it's unix, couldn't you just do "sudo rm -rf /*" ?

 

[timswim78]

You could also boot from a Live Linux CD, such as ubuntu, to format the drive. However, it would not be as secure as DBAN (in case you have bank accounts or other personal info on there.

 

[Nothinman]

You could also boot from a Live Linux CD, such as ubuntu, to format the drive. However, it would not be as secure as DBAN (in case you have bank accounts or other personal info on there.

If you really want something like dban then just run 'dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/whatever' and it'll write random data to that drive. If you want all zeros use /dev/zero instead of /dev/urandom.

 

[umrigar]

1. Go into System Prefs & create a new Admin user.
2. Delete all of your data folders if they're not in your Home folder.
3. Log out of current account, log into new Admin account.
4. Delete old account from within System Prefs.
5. Launch Disk Utility and use the Erase Free Space, choose 7-pass if you want to be paranoid.

 

[umrigar]

Originally posted by: timswim78
Just download DBAN. http://dban.sourceforge.net/

DBAN doesn't work on non-i386 architecture.

 

[TheStu]

It is a MacBook, ergo an x86 processor, I am guessing that is analogous to i386

 

[umrigar]

tru, stu... but i bet it won't boot off a Windows disc.
Apple requires Boot Camp to run a Mac on Windows natively.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/bootcamp.html

 

[TheStu]

You can install Vista onto MacBooks without bootcamp, that is how one had to do it before bootcamp supported it (at least that was the guide that I followed). Drop the disk in, hold down C or Alt to bring up the boot menu and then run it.