reformatting my mac's harddrive to bring it back to factory spec?

Question

hi there -

i sold my ibook g4 (with tiger os) to my mother-in-law but would like to bring the laptop back to factory spec, erasing all of my data, before giving it to her. can someone tell me how to do this?

thanks in advance.

M

Answer 1

If you have the emergency restore CD that came with the mac, you can just insert the disk, and run the installer.

When it says what disk to install it to, click the Options (or something like that) button right under it, and to the left of the back and next buttons.

Then click the radio button at the bottom of the popup screen that will wipe clean and reinstall. Then press continue, and it will reformat and restore all programs and settings to out of the box condition.

Answer 2

I don't think resetting factory defaults will erase files. It will probably only affect your changes to system settings.

I don't know Macs, but if they have a file/folder similar to "My Documents" in Windows, couldn't you open it, select all, and delete? Unless your mother-in-law has a degree in computer science I doubt she will be able to recover any of your information.

Alternatively, if you have the system CD, you might consider reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling the operating system.

This link will give you much information.

http://www.google.com/custom?domains=eHow.com&q=format+a+Mac&sitesearch=eHow.com&client=pub-5540093232741418&forid=1&channel=5414437852&ie=ISO-8859-1&oe=ISO-8859-1&cof=GALT%3A%23339900%3BGL%3A1%3BDIV%3A%23336699%3BVLC%3A663399%3BAH%3Acenter%3BBGC%3AFFFFFF%3BLBGC%3AFFFFFF%3BALC%3A0033CC%3BLC%3A0033CC%3BT%3A000000%3BGFNT%3A0000FF%3BGIMP%3A0000FF%3BLH%3A48%3BLW%3A115%3BL%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.ehow.com%2Fimages%2F16473300.gif%3BS%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.ehow.com%3BFORID%3A1%3B&hl=en