A conundrum

[RussT]

Hi All, hope you can help. I am involved with a charity in NW England and we have about 20 desktop Macs which were used for education in the community. They have not been used now for years and need disposal. My challenge is that the passwords have been lost and I cannot log into them. As there may potentially be private data on them, I cannot just take them to the recycling. As a charity we also cannot afford to pay a professional to remove and wipe the drives.
I have a basic understanding of windows pc’s and laptops and can take one apart but no Mac experience.

First question is, can I wipe them without taking the hard drive out and, if not, how easily do they come apart.

Many thanks for any help you can give.
Cheers
Russ

 

[MacsBug]

Hi Russ,

First thing to try is to start up a Mac while holding down the Command and R keys. This will take you into the Recovery partition on the Mac. You can then go into Disk Utility and erase the drives. There should be an Security Option to do a 3 or 7 pass erase to make sure that the data is scrubbed,

Just note that this can take 24 hours or more to do a secure erase.

If you are going to be giving away(or selling) the Macs then you should reinstall the macOS after you do the erase.

 

[RussT]

Ok that is great, many thanks, I’ll be giving amit a try. Really appreciate it sit.

 

[RussT]

Hi MacsBug, thanks again. I have attempted this and getting “couldn’t unmount disk” - any further advice please?

 

[MacsBug]

On older systems, I believe that you need to select the volume that has the OS on it. Not the drive.

 

[RussT]

Hi MacsBug, thanks again. I have attempted this and getting “couldn’t unmount disk” - any further advice please?

 

[RussT]

Ok thanks, I’ll retry