Disposing of an iMac

Dear FreewayTalk

As you may have read in my previous postings, I recently bought myself
a new aluminium iMac (and very nice it is too). But I now have to
dispose of the original iMac, the one with the slightly unreliable
hard drive.

Of course, I will delete the copies of Freeway that I have on that
computer, as Keith Martin said, and I had better uninstall Canvas 9
too. But there’s another problem here. When I throw away the computer,
at my local Household Waste Site, it will not cease to exist: it will
go to a salvage centre somewhere, in a Chinese back street for all I
know, and the people there will try to repair the hard drive. After
that they may try to read all my personal information - passwords,
name and address and so on. So how do I stop this from happening?

One way would be to delete everything and use Trash Secure Delete, I
suppose, but there’s always the chance that I could miss something. So
should I encrypt everything? Should I use FileVault? I hope that’s
what you are going to tell me.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

Regards

Graham Smith
Bury St Edmunds, UK


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You could use Disk Utility or some other 3rd Party software (Drive Genius etc.) to overwrite the the data. There are different levels of overwrite you can choose from depending on how concerned you are about security but I would not trust Trash Secure Delete to do the job. Depending in part on the drive size and the level you choose, overwriting can take a very long time. Other than that, rip out the drive and burn it.

T.

On Sep 1, 2008, at 7:51 PM, Graham Smith wrote:

After that they may try to read all my personal information - passwords,

name and address and so on. So how do I stop this from happening?

One way would be to delete everything and use Trash Secure Delete, I

suppose, but there’s always the chance that I could miss something.

Sometime around 1/9/08 (at 20:02 -0500) Todd said:

rip out the drive and burn it.

Well - don’t burn it necessarily. Just take it out and undo the drive
casing cover. Put it in the trash in bits. Unless you have the CIA
waiting to grab your black bags and go to work, it is as securely
unrecoverable as anything.

k


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At 01:51 +0100 2/9/08, Graham Smith wrote:

Dear FreewayTalk

As you may have read in my previous postings, I recently bought myself
a new aluminium iMac (and very nice it is too). But I now have to
dispose of the original iMac, the one with the slightly unreliable
hard drive.

Of course, I will delete the copies of Freeway that I have on that
computer, as Keith Martin said, and I had better uninstall Canvas 9
too. But there’s another problem here. When I throw away the computer,
at my local Household Waste Site, it will not cease to exist: it will
go to a salvage centre somewhere, in a Chinese back street for all I
know, and the people there will try to repair the hard drive. After
that they may try to read all my personal information - passwords,
name and address and so on. So how do I stop this from happening?

One way would be to delete everything and use Trash Secure Delete, I
suppose, but there’s always the chance that I could miss something. So
should I encrypt everything? Should I use FileVault? I hope that’s
what you are going to tell me.

Boot from the installation CD and run Disk Utility. Erase the drive
with the highest number of overwrites available.

Install original OS and put on ebay unless it’s really ancient. :slight_smile:

If you tip it, do so carefully. If in the UK, give it to the tip
people with a note of what’s wrong with it. They may well ‘find a
home’ for it - and maybe a new Apple user.

David


David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
email@hidden
www.ivdcs.co.uk


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I know of organizations that simply remove the drives when they sell/dispose/auction the computers. If you’re worried about personal info getting out, that’s the best way to go. Drives are cheap.


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On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 7:48 AM, Joe Muscara <email@hidden> wrote:

I know of organizations that simply remove the drives when they sell/dispose/auction the computers. If you’re worried about personal info getting out, that’s the best way to go. Drives are cheap.

I think you should remove the hard drive and have a go at it with a sledge hammer like that guy did to the copy machine in the movie “Office Space.”


Robin Stark

I think you should remove the hard drive and have a go at it with a sledge hammer like that guy did to the copy machine in the movie “Office Space.”

Just wear your safety glasses! :wink:


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on 02/09/2008 15:56, Joe Muscara at email@hidden wrote:

I think you should remove the hard drive and have a go at it with a sledge
hammer like that guy did to the copy machine in the movie ³Office

I just drive a sharp bricklayers chisel through the head & platters.

Space.²

Just wear your safety glasses! :wink:

Seconded ­ my grandfather lost an eye chopping wood ;~{{

Best wishes Peter

================================
Peter Tucker, Oxford UK email@hidden


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Even simpler, but less cathartic, is to run a couple of 1/4" holes through it with a drill. As I learned from the expensive recovery folks after a bad head crash, it’s not so much the missing bits as the cloud of magnetic dust inside the mechanism that renders a disk unrecoverable.

Walter


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Dear FreewayTalk

Thanks everyone for the advice. I decided to boot from the
installation CD that came with the computer, but it would only let me
do a Software Restore. I suppose that’s better than nothing. The
strange thing is, the hard drive seems to be working now, so it seems
a shame to throw the computer away. Anyway the computer now runs Mac
OS 9.2 and Mac OS X v10.0.4.

When I ran my computer again, it asked me for my personal details, so
this time I gave my address as 99 No Through Road, Surrogate, Wessex
MP3 2CV. That’s going to confuse someone. :wink:

Regards

Graham Smith
Bury St Edmunds, UK


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it would only let me
do a Software Restore.

Check in the menubar. You should be able to get to Disk Utility,
where you can blitz everything.

k


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On 4 Sep 2008, at 01:26, Graham Smith wrote:

Thanks everyone for the advice. I decided to boot from the
installation CD that came with the computer, but it would only let me
do a Software Restore.

I know it looks as though that’s all it’ll let you do, but It’ll let
you do more than that if you poke around a bit in the menus; it’ll let
you run Disk Utility for instance, which is where you can erase,
format, partition etc.

best wishes,

Paul Bradforth

http://www.paulbradforth.com


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Dear Keith and Paul

Sorry but that didn’t work. The Software Restore discs that came with
this particular computer contain a Mac OS 9.2 program that doesn’t
have a menu, for some reason. So perhaps I have done everything that
it is possible to do with this machine.

Regards

Graham Smith
Bury St Edmunds, UK

On 4 Sep 2008, at 10:09, Paul Bradforth wrote:

On 4 Sep 2008, at 01:26, Graham Smith wrote:

Thanks everyone for the advice. I decided to boot from the
installation CD that came with the computer, but it would only let me
do a Software Restore.

I know it looks as though that’s all it’ll let you do, but It’ll let
you do more than that if you poke around a bit in the menus; it’ll let
you run Disk Utility for instance, which is where you can erase,
format, partition etc.

best wishes,

Paul Bradforth

http://www.paulbradforth.com


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Dear Keith and Paul

Sorry but that didn’t work. The Software Restore discs that came with
this particular computer contain a Mac OS 9.2 program that doesn’t
have a menu, for some reason. So perhaps I have done everything that
it is possible to do with this machine.

Regards

Graham Smith
Bury St Edmunds, UK

On 4 Sep 2008, at 10:09, Paul Bradforth wrote:

On 4 Sep 2008, at 01:26, Graham Smith wrote:

Thanks everyone for the advice. I decided to boot from the
installation CD that came with the computer, but it would only let me
do a Software Restore.

I know it looks as though that’s all it’ll let you do, but It’ll let
you do more than that if you poke around a bit in the menus; it’ll let
you run Disk Utility for instance, which is where you can erase,
format, partition etc.

best wishes,

Paul Bradforth

http://www.paulbradforth.com


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