Preparing a MacBook for a family member.

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Level 1

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Preparing a MacBook for a family member.

Guys, I recently brought a 15" MacBook Pro and plan on giving my 13" MacBook to my sister. I was planning on reinstalling the OS on the MacBook prior to giving it to her however a colleague suggested that I do the following:

1) Create a user account for her and make her admin
2) Login under her account and delete my original account

The issue with this is that there doesn't seem to be any formatting involved and forensically my original data could still be recovered in the unfortunate case someone steals her MacBook. What do you guys suggest I do to the machine prior to passing it on to her?

Thanks in advance guys

Message was edited by: Brooklyn Jay

13" MacBook, 15" MacBook Pro, MacPro, iPhone4, iPhone3GS, & AirPort, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Oct 27, 2010 8:23 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 27, 2010 8:42 AM in response to Brooklyn Jay

Once you've deleted the account, and you have it all set up for your sister, boot from the original Cd or DVD. Quite the installer and fire up Disk Utility - there is an option to wipe free space at one of various levels of overwrite (the highest may take a very long time). A single pass, or at most two should be sufficient, especially since things will be further over-written once she starts using it.

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Answer 2

bistec2

Level 1

55 points

Oct 27, 2010 10:55 AM in response to Brooklyn Jay

Get a new drive, install OS X on it. Keep your old drive as a backup. That is what I do when giving or selling my macbook. It's faster than writing zero over your data or free space and nobody can ever access your files since there were never on the drive. HDD are fairly cheap. That's what I would do.

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Answer 3

rudysf

Level 1

15 points

Dec 1, 2010 10:14 PM in response to Brooklyn Jay

Hi:

I just purchased a 15" MacBook Pro and will be giving my MacBook to my sister. It recently had a new hard drive installed and today I picked it up from the Genius Bar after they replaced the Main Logic Board. I want to completely erase the drive and reinstall Snow Leopard so she has a clean slate to work with. What would be your recommendation for achieving this? I do not want any trace of my data left on the MacBook in case it is lost or stolen. The last time I gave my sister my an older MacBook I reinstalled the operating system and wiped the data from the hard drive but there were still traces of my old passwords and I never figured out how to change the computer name from my name to her name.

Thank you for your help.

rudysf

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