Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On today's episode let me show you how to get your Mac ready for resale or recycling.
Before you do anything else you want to make sure you are completely done with the Mac.
So you want to make sure all your data is off it.
Get your new Mac up and running.
Perhaps you've backed things up, archived things.
You don't need anything else on the hard drive.
In addition you want to make sure you log out of a lot of different services.
You want you make sure you go to iTunes and use the
Deauthorize menu choice there to deauthorize iTunes.
You want to make sure you go to iCloud and turn off iCloud including Find My Mac.
You want to make sure that is off and any other thing you may think of.
For instance I use Adobe Creative Cloud.
I would want to make sure I was fully logged out of that so that I can again reinstall
Abode apps on my new Mac.
So I want to wipe this 2006 iMac, 20 inch iMac, and I've already got everything set
on this.
I've got iCloud disabled, everything like that and I don't have any data I need on here.
I'm going to Restart and when I Restart I'm going to hold down the Command and R keys.
That is going to restart it in recovery mode and bring up the recovery partition.
So now in recovery mode with recovery partition I've booted into a completely separate part
of the drive.
The same as having an optical disk in there that you can boot to except that it is just
a separate little part of the hard drive that you've probably haven't even needed up until
now.
There are two things that I want to do.
The first thing is that I want to run Disk Utility.
Disk Utility, which you may recognize because you can bring it up and use it for other things
when you are using your Mac normally.
Select the drive here and you click Erase.
Then you want to erase it.
Format Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
Give it a name like Macintosh HD, something standard like that.
But you want to select the Security Options here.
Then you can select how much erasing you want to do.
You want to move it up one notch to this setting that allows you to, it will write zeros over
the entire drive.
Not only destroy what is on the drive but actually override it completely.
You have higher options here that will take a long time to do and you don't really need
those for most Macs.
If you work in some sort of sensitive industry then you might want to use those but then
if you do you probably have IT people handling this for you.
You wouldn't be doing this yourself.
So do the first setting here.
You can see it says will zero out data.
Then you erase.
That will take a little time to zero everything out.
Then when it reboots into Recovery Partition you end up back here now with an empty hard
drive with only disk recovery partition on it.
You would do reinstall Mac OS X and it is going to hit you, most likely, with that it
can't connect to the network.
It needs the network to be able to grab Mac OS X.
It is not installing it from something it has locally.
It is actually pulling it from Apple servers.
So you want to go and turn on WiFi and select a network.
You are going to have to enter in a password.
Once it joins the network it will take just a few seconds, you can see up there that it
has joined, you can Try Again.
You can see now it is ready to continue.
So you can continue now installing.
It is going to install the operating system that came with the Mac, in this case the one
up from that since Lion is the first version that it can do an installation from Apple
servers.
So you may see Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, or Yosemite here and it will install over
the network.
Then what you want to do is when you get to the point where it asks you to register, just
select a location is the very first thing it does, you want to quit.
It gives you the option to quit and shut down the machine.
That way whoever you hand it off to will get it like it is a new Mac and they will be asked
for that stuff and be able to register it for themselves from that point on.
So if your Mac is so old that it doesn't have the recovery partition in it what you need
to do is find the disks that came with your Mac or some upgrade disk, like the Snow Leopard
upgrade disks, put that in the drive.
Then reboot holding the C key down.
This will boot it using that piece of optical media instead of the recovery partition.
Then it is pretty much the same thing from there.
If you can't get either one to work, the recovery partition or putting a CD or DVD in there,
then you still can do it but you are going to have to build a USB flash drive that will
act as something you can boot from.
It is a pretty complex procedure.
I'm going to include links to a lot of pages at Apple.com that talks about doing this.
So check this post at MacMost.com.