Wiping/Erasing Everything After a Catastrophic Failure and Before Recycling iMac

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Level 1

14 points

Wiping/Erasing Everything After a Catastrophic Failure and Before Recycling iMac

I have an iMac Retina 5K, 27-Inch (2017) that I recently had a catastrophic error/failure. I can only boot it from a backup of the drive and NOT from the drive in the iMac. Using disk utility, I am able to erase/format the hard drive. With this having a Fusion Drive (combo normal hard drive and solid-state drive), would this only show up in disk utility as only one drive? I'm currently doing a 3-pass secure format of the hard drive. When doing this does it erase the solid-state drive also? I’m just wanting to make sure that I erase everything before I send it in for recycling.

iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 13.6

Posted on Jul 6, 2024 11:07 AM

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Answer 1

steve626

Level 6

17,179 points

Jul 6, 2024 11:20 AM in response to ChasWatson

I think it depends on the type of failure. If the two elements of the Fusion drive became disconnected, there would be two separate drives. I don't know enough about how Apple's MacOS stores some information on the SSD piece versus the HDD piece. Someone with a lot of time on their hands could presumably try to recover some bits from one of the other.

A repair shop (preferably an Apple Authorized Service Provider) can open the computer and remove both drives for you. You can then destroy them physically fairly easily. With a sledgehammer, for instance, or hammer and nails. (I know one person who used his worn out drives out in the desert for target practice!) Or the shop can physically destroy them for you. If you buy a new Mac from them they will likely do this for free.

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Answer 2

ChasWatson Author

Level 1

14 points

Jul 6, 2024 1:59 PM in response to steve626

Thanks Steve626,

I just went ahead and removed the hard drive, disassembled it, and will destroy the platters tomorrow.

OWC has a good video on how to replace the hard drive and it ended up being easier than I expected. Since I’m sending it to Apple for recycling, I wasn’t overly concerned about cracking the screen - which I didn’t. But my luck would have been worse if I was actually wanting to replace the hard drive.

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Wiping/Erasing Everything After a Catastrophic Failure and Before Recycling iMac

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