Doing a drive wipe on an old Mac prior to disposal . . .

[britechguy]

I have not been doing much of any Mac-intensive work for years now as the demand is just not there, but have had contact from a client who has two old Macbooks that she wants to have wiped before donating them.

Just curious what folks are doing in this regard, preferably without needing to pull the drives to do it.

 

[Canadian Tech]

Press Command (⌘) and R on startup to get into the MacOS Recovery. From there you can wipe the drive with Disk Utility and then Reinstall MacOS.

 

[britechguy]

Thank you!

 

[Markverhyden]

I have not been doing much of any Mac-intensive work for years now as the demand is just not there, but have had contact from a client who has two old Macbooks that she wants to have wiped before donating them.

Just curious what folks are doing in this regard, preferably without needing to pull the drives to do it.

Depends. And I'm not talking about adult sanitary products...... LOL

Yes you can boot into recovery mode. But there's much more. Machines that natively shipped with 10.7, Lion, and has the "recovery partition" built into firmware. Basically PXE from an image on Apples servers. In those cases you can specify multiple passes for security. If your machine shipped before 10.7, and upgraded to 10.7 or higher, it's recovery partition is actually on the local drive. So if you nuke the entire disk the recovery partition goes with it. You can just nuke the MacintoshHD, again with multiple passes, and still be able to restore from the partition.

Either way I'd not use the built in recovery method. It might get tied to the original owners Apple account. In fact I'd do nothing more that nuke the machine and let them know the new owner will have to pay you or someone else to put on an OS if they can't figure it out. By the way, assuming they are Intel machines, they can run Windows, 7+, and Linux.

VERY IMPORTANT - make sure they check to make sure it's not listed in Find My Mac. You can login to the iCloud account and check there. If it's not removed you won't be able to attach it to a new account. But I did read some where there are ways to clear those BIOS/firmware.

 

[britechguy]

@Markverhyden

I need to get a handle on the exact vintage, but I suspect these are old enough that they actually are "recycler fodder."

Will check the other bits you've noted.

 

[Markverhyden]

@Markverhyden

I need to get a handle on the exact vintage, but I suspect these are old enough that they actually are "recycler fodder."

Will check the other bits you've noted.

The serial number should be on the bottom. Usually stamped/etched. If you can get it plug it in here to get all the info you need. But I agree. Most likely they're in the 10 years old range. Which puts them into the hobbyist category if they are running.

 

[britechguy]

Press Command (⌘) and R on startup to get into the MacOS Recovery. From there you can wipe the drive with Disk Utility and then Reinstall MacOS.

Thanks for this. An entirely different client wanted to pass along his still-very-much-in-support MacBook Pro, on which he had been running Sequoia, to someone else.

It was being very cranky, but eventually I got this method to work and it reinstalled Ventura, which was what it originally came with. I'm sure the recipient can do the update to Sequoia.

@Markverhyden, thanks very much for the tip about checking whether devices were registered with the Find My service. What is funny is how many long-gone devices were still there, which I removed, and that the MacBook Pro that is being passed on was there, too, but its newer replacement was not. I ended up adding the new one as it does occasionally travel with the owner, though most of its life is on a desk with the lid closed, being used like a desktop computer with an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

 

[britechguy]

Now a follow-up: The MacBook Pro that I just reinstalled Ventura on was being very cranky about trying to boot normally prior to having done this, and was constantly coming up with a message that the drive was encrypted and a password was needed to open it. No matter what we did, and the password was accepted, we were in a boot loop.

When I got into MacOS Recovery, eventually, as part of reinstalling MacOS we got the same prompt but this time, after giving it the required password, the process proceeded.

After the OS was reinstalled, it's coming up with the classic "Hello" screen, which indicates to me that no trace of the previous account/ownership exists, even if the drive itself has not been wiped. Would this be correct? Or did the drive get wiped because of the peculiarity we were having saying the drive was encrypted and required a password.

Everything I have found regarding the reinstallation of MacOS is that it should have preserved the prior user's account and data if you used the Disk Utility in Recovery to nuke it, but we did not do this. Yet, the behavior of the computer is as that of a "fresh out of the box" Mac, which suggests to me that, at the very least, that someone who's not using forensic disk software to recover data would have no access to anything from the previous owner.

I just can't figure out what has occurred here since we did have the device out of Find My before proceeding, and now that Ventura is reinstalled it's behaving like typical "just out of the box" MacBooks do.

 

[Markverhyden]

"constantly coming up with a message that the drive was encrypted and a password was needed to open it"

This is a classic symptom of a Mac device whereby the user forgot the original password. Then used Command + r to get into recovery mode, then did a password reset via CLI to the main account. Reboot and login with the new password but one will still get enter password requests becasue keychain is locked with the original password.

The only time that original stuff is kept is if there is just an OS install. aka re-install over it self.

 

[britechguy]

Well, then, it looks like what I did has restored the machine to "out of the box" state, but possibly with non-wiped released data blocks on the system disk drive. Given where it's going, this is not a really big concern.