[Youngrabbit]

Finally upgraded to iMac and would like to donate my eMac to local charity. I need to know how to absolutely erase the contents of the memory so no personal or other info is given away.

Any suggestions?

[ghporter]

Welcome to our forums!

"Memory" is not an issue-all "memory" is volatile and is emptied each time you turn off the computer completely. I think you are asking about your hard drive, which is NON-volatile (its contents stay whether the power is on or off). Wiping a hard drive is easily done with Disk Utility. Boot from your OS X disc, open DU from the Tools menu, select the whole drive, and then choose "Erase." I'd go with the 3-pass option; it overwrites the entire drive three times, making any data on that drive "practically" unrecoverable. By "practically," I mean that it would take an awful lot of time and effort (both very expensive) to get your data off that drive. This is way more than sufficient for a machine that you are giving to someone else to use.

Hope that helps!

[l008com]

I do one-pass. The protects your data from all but the NSA . . . and even then, their ability to get your data could be questionable. Also hard drives are "memory". Memory doesn't explicitly mean RAM, it is a generic term that does usually mean RAM, but can also mean anything else.

[Eriamjh]

ghporter's advice is sound. You could do a 7 pass, but it took 45 minutes to zero out the 60GB pismo drive I just sold so you'd have to multiply that times 3 or 7 to determine how long it will really take. If your HDD is bigger, it will take longer. If you start it before going to bed, it will be done by morning. Then add another hour for reinstalling the OS (if you are a nice person). then you're all set.

[Gankdawg]

Originally Posted by l008com 

Also hard drives are "memory". Memory doesn't explicitly mean RAM, it is a generic term that does usually mean RAM, but can also mean anything else.

I'll respectfully disagree. Memory CAN mean anything else, but in the computer world, memory means volatile RAM. So many people refer to the entire case as the hard drive, we need to keep educating folks about the correct terms to use when referring to parts of a computer.

[l008com]

Well if you're going to educate people, then I stand by what i said. Memory is a generic term that means anything that remembers, RAM is RAM, hard drive is hard drive.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by l008com 

Well if you're going to educate people, then I stand by what i said. Memory is a generic term that means anything that remembers, RAM is RAM, hard drive is hard drive.

While you're technically accurate, your position requires qualifying what kind of "memory" you're talking about. RAM is "volatile memory," while a hard drive is "non-volatile" memory. And contrariwise, both can be called storage-volatile or non-volatile...

By convention, in desktop computing volatile storage/memory is referred to as RAM (because there are extremely few instances of volatile storage being anything but RAM), while non-volatile storage is on a hard drive-or something that emulates one, like a SSD. Further, all OSs that are in widespread use treat volatile storage as RAM (whether it's DDRAM, SDRAM, flash, or anything else), while they treat non-volatile storage as hard drives. RAM is dealt with in one way-as random access storage, while hard drives are dealt with as file-level storage.

Back on topic, I agree that a single-pass wipe (using Disk Utility or other tool) is typically adequate, but people tend to feel unprotected if they don't have some sort of assurance that the drive is more thoroughly wiped. Something that meets or exceeds DoD standards for remanence management gives folks a nice warm feeling, despite taking at least three times as long as a single pass wipe.