Sanitizing a hard drive?

[Jumpem]

First I know nothing about Macs.

A friend apparently did something stupid with his work laptop, and needs to turn it in.

How do I go about erasing whatever data is there, not simply deleting it via the OS? Is there any way to do it without causing the OS and apps to be removed?

 

[potato28]

DBAN. Load it to a CD.

 

[Jumpem]

Originally posted by: potato28
DBAN. Load it to a CD.

Looks like its Windows only.

He doesn't have the discs for the OS and apps and wants to keep them. But all the sanitization apps seem to nuke the entire drive.

 

[Jumpem]

This seems like it may do the trick:

http://www.mireth.com/pub/sxme.html

ShredIt For Mac OS X
Protect yourself with this easy to use privacy software. Get all the shredding features you need - shred files, folders, disk free space, files you've already deleted, hard drives, external hard drives and even CD-RWs.

 

[mshan]

There is an erase command in Disk Utility in Mac OS X Tiger.

I think you can choose a multiple overwrite option that is supposed to do a good job.

(to erase an internal system hard drive, you may have to boot from the Apple restore disk)