Really old Mac, how do I wipe it?
November 1, 2024 3:00 PM Subscribe
Just started a new systems analyst's job and I've inherited the the old manager's iMac collection (2005).
I'd like to e-waste them but the good IT policy person inside me says I should do a multiple HDD wipe pass just to make sure any personal data is gone. The problem is they're OLD and my modern iMac knowledge is failing me.
I come from the Intel/Apple Silicom era, so normally I'd just go into Recovery Mode and wipe it using disk utility.
These macs are from a time before Apple Intel (I think they're PowerPC's) and don't have Recovery Mode. Everything I can find says to use the original MacOS Leopard CD and wipe it using that but despite my previous employee's hoarding tendency there's no Leopard CD to be found.
I got an .iso of MacOS Leopard from the Internet Archive and wrote it to a thumbdrive using balenaEtcher but the Mac refuses to see it as a bootable source (holding down option when booting).
I'm kinda stumped. All the advice I can find online is for MacOS El Captain onwards.
I come from the Intel/Apple Silicom era, so normally I'd just go into Recovery Mode and wipe it using disk utility.
These macs are from a time before Apple Intel (I think they're PowerPC's) and don't have Recovery Mode. Everything I can find says to use the original MacOS Leopard CD and wipe it using that but despite my previous employee's hoarding tendency there's no Leopard CD to be found.
I got an .iso of MacOS Leopard from the Internet Archive and wrote it to a thumbdrive using balenaEtcher but the Mac refuses to see it as a bootable source (holding down option when booting).
I'm kinda stumped. All the advice I can find online is for MacOS El Captain onwards.
Response by poster: @axiom
The only reason I want to keep things in the world of recovery mode is I don't have the tools to get into the macs to extract the HDD and even in 2007 Macs weren't easy to take apart.
posted by Snuffman at 3:24 PM on November 1
The only reason I want to keep things in the world of recovery mode is I don't have the tools to get into the macs to extract the HDD and even in 2007 Macs weren't easy to take apart.
posted by Snuffman at 3:24 PM on November 1
According to this blog post, DBAN has a version compatible with PowerPC. If you can make a bootable CD with that, it might do the job. There are a few interesting tips here about making bootable drives for PPC.
posted by dreamyshade at 3:42 PM on November 1 [1 favorite]
posted by dreamyshade at 3:42 PM on November 1 [1 favorite]
Do you happen to have a firewire cable around? You can boot one of the machines into target mode and plug it into another one that's fully booted up and use disk utility to wipe the other computer.
posted by gregr at 4:07 PM on November 1 [2 favorites]
posted by gregr at 4:07 PM on November 1 [2 favorites]
« Older What is up with butter these days? | Is it possible to make email manageable? Or at... Newer »
You are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX bs=1Mto overwrite it with random data. At least, that's what I would do in linux and it should work the same in BSD *nix, aka, MacOS X.posted by axiom at 3:09 PM on November 1