So I just got a shiny new iMac via all of our Christmas gift cards and have officially transferred everything over from my 2004 eMac ( ). Side bar - you should've seen all of these 20-something Apple kids staring at that thing when I brought it in. Like monkeys looking at the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Anyway, I'm going to have it recycled and wanted to know how I can wipe the entire memory from the computer before doing so. (photos, tunes, internet history, emails, documents, everything).

I tried to donate it but most non-profits that use computers tend to use PC's.

Thanks for any help you can give.

-RD

there are some programs that do this by writing zeros over the data multiple times, it often takes hours/days and im not sure what the best way to do it is. most programs cost like $30-$50, I have never found a free one yet.

If you still have your old OS disc that came with the eMac, you should be able to use it to do a "clean install" of the OS that will wipe all existing data off of the harddrive. (You may even be able to do this with a newer OS disc if it's like ver. 10.2 or lower. It just has to be something that's compatible with your old eMac, and the install disc you got with your new machine won't be.) This might not be as complete a wipe as what Patrick's talking about, but it should be good enough.

I'm not sure if something like this works with Mac hardware, but it has a bunch of data wiping tools on it and is free.

If I were you, I'd remove the hard drive, buy an enclosure case for it (less than $10) and use it as an external backup.

funny visual

I'd just take the drive out and put it in an enclosure. If you don't wanna do that though, boot OS X from the CD and do a multiple pass wipe from Disk Utility.

A can of coke would do it too, right?

Thanks all. I think I do have the original OS disk in my office.

I'll give that a try first.