Preparing Mac Mini (mid 2011) for sale

Question

Preparing Mac Mini (mid 2011) for sale

Hello all,

I'm selling my month old Mac Mini (mid 2011), as I was gifted with a new iMac and I had some questions.

Everywhere I've looked on how to prepare a Mac Mini for sale, includes instructions for when the Mac Mini still had a physical drive, but as that is no longer the case, I'm slightly confused as to how to go about wiping (securely - I saw the options to use the 7 pass method) my Mac Mini, so that the next person to receive it is greeted by the setup screen.

I have a bootcamp partition in addition to the standard Mac partition.

Hopefully, somebody can write or point me to a guide that's updated for the Mac Mini (Mid 2011) model.

Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.7.1)

Posted on Sep 13, 2011 6:43 PM

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Answer 1

Sep 13, 2011 6:57 PM in response to SphericalPuma

I think if you boot from the recovery parition you can wipe the drive, no?

Command-R to the rescue.

Just hold down Command-R during startup and Lion Recovery springs into action. It lets you choose from common utilities: You can run Disk Utility to check or repair your hard drive, erase your hard drive and reinstall a fresh copy of Lion

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Answer 2

Sep 13, 2011 7:04 PM in response to John Beatty1

Yes, but I wasn't sure as to which drive to wipe, as I didn't want to wipe the recovery drive. When I click on the Mac HD drive it has a dropdown menu with such things as "mac extended, journaled, etc." so I was just a tad confused. It won't let me erase the bootcamp partition, but I'm assuming that if I wipe the standard Mac HD it will wipe the bootcamp as well.

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Answer 3

Sep 14, 2011 3:41 PM in response to SphericalPuma

Easiest to run Boot Camp Assistant. It will delete the Windows partition for you.

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Answer 4

Ziatron

Level 5

4,214 points

Sep 14, 2011 7:57 PM in response to SphericalPuma

Mac Mini still had a physical drive

I assume that you mean optical drive?

I saw the options to use the 7 pass method

You will find the 7 pass method can take days to complete. Unless you work for the CIA the 1 pass method should be fine.

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Answer 5

Sep 14, 2011 7:59 PM in response to SphericalPuma

Got everything taken care of.

Even after a wipe the bootcamp drive was still there, so I had to re-format the bootcamp drive as ms-fat and then use bootcamp assistant to re-partition the drive.

After all that was done, I wiped the drive securely and re-installed lion.

Thanks for the suggestions!

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