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I'm selling an old iMac G4 20" and want to wipe my personal information from it. Unfortunately, I no longer have the install disks.
Can I boot it into Target Disk Mode, mount it from another Mac (via FireWire), and format the drive?
Any other ideas?
I need to do the same thing with a MacBook (13" 2006).
Yes, but the computers won’t have an OS afterwards. If you choose to erase the iMac’s entire drive, you need to format it with the APM partition table map.
(141983)
That should work. However, there is one consideration. I believe that iMac has the optical drive and hard drive on the same IDE bus. When using FireWire Target Disk Mode, only the drive that is set as master is accessible on the other Mac. So, if the hard drive is set as slave (optical drive is master), the hard drive may not be accessible.
On the other Mac, you should use the "security" setting to zero out the hard drive during the Erase, to make your data unrecoverable.
Also, the iMac may not be as valuable if you sell it in non-bootable condition.
In case others read this ...
To be more precise, the steps are
From /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility
• Select the drive containing the user directories.
• Click on Erase
• Click on the button, "Security Options..."
* Choose one of the options that overwrites zeros or random data.
How to Wipe iMac G4 Drive w/o Disks
