: I'm jealous of your new G5. Do you want to leave the new user a fully
: operational hard drive with OS 9 and OS X both installed, or do you just
: want to give them a bootable drive? Also, do you want to insure that your
: personal stuff is unrecoverable? The simplest thing you can do overall is
: to simply use the installation disk(s) that came with your computer - it
: will restore your hard drive to its original install condition, which the
: new user can then upgrade at their choosing. Now if you're just talking
: about how to format the hard drive, the OS X Drive Utility on the OS X
: installer disk will do this, and it has a checkbox for OS 9 compatibility.
: To do this, boot off the installer disk but when the installer comes on,
: select Drive Utility from the Installer menu instead. Be advised, however,
: that this will not erase your hard drive's contents - it will merely delet
: the volume info, but an ordinary disk editor will still be able to recover
: much of what you have. I can't remember if Drive Utility has an option to
: overwrite the drive instead, but ther are numerous utilities that will do
: this. Once you have reinstalled your OS(s), simply use one of these to
: securely erase your hard drives free space - it will overwrite it with
: zeros. The FBI could still recover your data, but mere mortals couldn't.
I was thinking I would just give them a bootable drive, in which case I would use the installation disks that came with my computer? If I did this, would the data be unrecoverable? Its probably not that big of a deal, but I tend to be a bit paranoid when it comes to social security numbers and stuff.
Thanks.
