I'm headed back to the States for an extended period and want to sell my MacBook Air.

Taking into consideration the local Apple Store folks are not going to anytime soon occupy a Genius Bar like we have back home, and that I myself am technologically stupid, what is the best/safest/foolproof way to erase everything in preparation for selling it?

Google Mac then ask how to reset mac it will wipe all and leave it like new.

Google Mac then ask how to reset mac it will wipe all and leave it like new.

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I did.

Read it carefully. Ready to get started ….

Then I read the comments, the first of which was:

"This was a disaster!!! it wont let you reinstall the OS... Do not follow this horrible tutorial!!!!"

Which other commenters agreed with. Same with other, similar sites.

This is why I'm asking here, for first hand experience.

In LOS, getting my Mac worked on, is nothing like running into the Genius Bar just up the street back home. It's an adventure, usually a very frustrating and expensive one.

I would recommend looking in the Mac Rumour forums

Shut down the machine, restart it holding Command-R until you get a new menu. That will bring you to Utilities. Click on that, then erase free space. When that's done, click on erase - a security button comes up, offering you a sliding scale of rewriting your HD with zeroes fro 0 to 7 times, 7 supposedly being the most secure. the buyer will have to download and install whatever OSX they choose.

Duplicate.

If you do not want to shut the machine down , just go to Applications and click on utilities......

Okay, thanks.

So if I take every folder and document, etc, off the computer, save them to an external hard drive, then use CCleaner to do a 35 pass Overwrite, then use CCleaner again to perform a 35 pass erasing of white space, would there still be anything left to recover?

Reason I ask is this would not require reinstalling the operating system, which is what has me worried.

Thanks.

Harddisk erasure leaves a clean disk, requiring the new owner to reinstall OSX, but the only way to ensure, nobody gets hold or your data.

In LOS, getting my Mac worked on, is nothing like running into the Genius Bar just up the street back home.

And I fully agree with Sheldon opinion

Back up your drive, go to application; disc utilities; erase drive. Hopefully you have a backup of Mac OS 10.7 or later so that can be installed. Then you can download Mavericks and update the OS for free.

Back up your drive, go to application; disc utilities; erase drive. Hopefully you have a backup of Mac OS 10.7 or later so that can be installed. Then you can download Mavericks and update the OS for free.

I looked at this. But it won't allow me to erase. Actually, it won't allow me to do anything.

Guess I'm gonna have to take it to the local yokels.

My approach is to encrypt the entire hard drive, using File Vault.

Then install a clean copy of OSX over the encrypted disk, using a USB or DVD.

Don't encrypt the clean version.

Back up your drive, go to application; disc utilities; erase drive. Hopefully you have a backup of Mac OS 10.7 or later so that can be installed. Then you can download Mavericks and update the OS for free.

I looked at this. But it won't allow me to erase. Actually, it won't allow me to do anything.

Guess I'm gonna have to take it to the local yokels.

You need to boot from an external HD to erase the internal drive...

copy all the stuff you need then create a new user and delete your user account it should then delete all the files also, manually delete applications you dont want, defrag disk and then run ccleaner to format spare space.

copy all the stuff you need then create a new user and delete your user account it should then delete all the files also, manually delete applications you dont want, defrag disk and then run ccleaner to format spare space.

Now that sounds like something a technologically stupid person would do.

Which means it should work just fine for me!

Will that make the data on the old user account inaccessible?