Mac Book Pro, securely erasing HD, how to?

O

one swell foop

[H]ard|Gawd
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Nov 16, 2004
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My g/f has a macbook pro, circa mid 2006 that's finally bitten the dust. Apple says it would cost $1300+ to repair, so she got a new one. She'd like to sell the old one to someone that can use it for parts, but we want to wipe the data first.

The caveat is that her optical disc drive is jacked up and can be trusted to continue running a disc if it miraculously accepts it at all. All methods I could find for erasing the startup disc require using the cd drive.

Is there a method or program to run a dish wipe utility from a USB Key? Just want to write to zero several times so that someone can't recover any data on the drive, and I'd like to avoid disassembling the computer just to remove the drive and wipe it using another machine.

Thanks in advance for any advice!
 
Another idea: Why not remove the hard drive and replace it with a cheap 100GB drive? You could put the old drive in a USB case and plug it into the new laptop for use as an external drive.
 
Boot the machine off an external optical drive using the install CD for Tiger or DVD for later versions of Tiger, Leopard, etc. Run Disk Utility off the Tools menu, choose the option to do a secure wipe.

Or pull the drive out as mentioned above, attach it to a desktop (external USB cases are cheap nowadays, especially for 2.5" laptop drives) and use a tool to do it like Eraser, DBAN (which Eraser uses, most secure wipe software does use DBAN actually), etc.
 
Thanks Muzzle, I'll try this.
To the others. I want to go for minimal effort if possible, and I also want to avoid spending any more money on the machine. As I don't have an external drive case to fit a 2.5 inch drive or an optical drive, I'll save those options as a last resort.
 
Go over the whole HDD multiple times with random data. Just because something is overwritten once or twice doesn't mean it can't be recovered.
 
or for the price of firewire cables you can get the usb cd for the macbook air use it and take it back heh
 
take the hard drive out, throw it in a usb/fw case, then run your laptop or her laptop with the install disk, start up disc utilities, and select erase, then tell it to erase with security level high, it will ask you how many times you want to read/write over the hard drive.

I can't remember the exact name of the button, but its in the erase / format tab.

I can create some screen shots if needed.
 
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