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Sosa · Jul 23, 2010, 03:54 PM

Greetings,

I am about to sell my old 12" PB and was wondering whether deleting my admin account on the computer would be safe. I know I can zero out the drive and reinstall but that would take a lot of time. I don't really have much sensitive information in there. How easy would it be to recover my old files for malevolent purposes? Is there another option short of a zeroing out the drive and reinstalling the OS 10.4 (what I currently have)?

Thanks!

TETENAL · Jul 23, 2010, 04:14 PM

You can zero out the empty space after you deleted your account using Disk Utility.

Sosa · Jul 23, 2010, 04:28 PM

Really? I can zero out empty parts of the drive? I did not know that! Thanks!

CharlesS · Jul 23, 2010, 04:42 PM

If you're selling the drive, it's better just to zero the thing and install a virgin OS on it. You'll be sure everything is gone, and the buyer will have the same out-of-the-box experience with it as if he'd bought it new, which is nice.

Sosa · Jul 23, 2010, 05:03 PM

Yep I will advise the buyer of this. Although I think he is interesting in holding on to certain applications, but these could also be installed after the fact.

BLAZE_MkIV · Jul 23, 2010, 06:29 PM

Since your including the installation material / registration codes for the software it's not that much of a bother to install it. I always wipe the computer when I get it.

cgc · Jul 23, 2010, 06:39 PM

I'd recommend zeroing the entire drive and reinstalling the OS.

Cold Warrior · Jul 23, 2010, 09:56 PM

I run the OS X 7-pass wipe on all machines I sell and ship it with a clean OS install with a blank password. This makes it easy for the buyer to quickly test out the machine, but also ensures I haven't left any personal data behind.

Sosa · Jul 23, 2010, 11:18 PM

Looks like I will reinstall. There is a weird issue with that PB, it seems to freeze when asked to restart. Formerly it would freeze on the restart with a black box appearing in the center, but now after deleting my admin account and zeroing the empty space it freezes on the shutting down . Perhaps it is a software issue and reinstalling the OS will correct it. Not a show stopper though, we rarely need to restart these machines anyway. But the buyer was a bit concerned so I'm going to delay the sale and see if a clean OS works.

jmiddel · Jul 25, 2010, 12:45 PM

Sounds to me like a hardware issue, bad RAM, HD or motherboard

Sosa · Jul 30, 2010, 11:25 AM

Update: After doing a fresh reinstall of 10.4 and updating to 10.4.11 it appears that the crash on restart has been corrected. I'm not 100% sure though. During the restart from doing a security update it crashed on restart as usual, but after all the updates were done I restarted twice with no issues. Meant to do it a few more times but ran out of time. Well now the computer is with a happy new owner ... who surprisingly is someone I see on a regular basis (a sale through Craiglist, what are the chances?) ... so I am sure to hear if any unexpected issues arise.

Oh and regarding the applications, I was able to create a dummy account on my current machine and use the migration assistant utility to copy applications over. Regardless the owner intended to wipe the drive again and install 10.5 ... which I do not have. ;-(