MacOS – “Erase and Install” function missing in Snow Leopard

Two things - if you don't know the basics of a unix shell syntax (having a space in the right place matters, punctuation like / matters) don't do step 2 unless you can afford to re-install everything again - the rm command is unforgiving - delete the wrong file or directory with rm -rf and the mac won't boot. You can be more secure by using the srm command instead of rm and it will slowly shred the files - I use srm -sz -rf instead of rm -rf below to shred once and then zero out (which ends up being two passes and then a delete - plenty secure for my needs and not as slow as the default 35 pass overwrite before the delete)

1. Do make sure the person buying the machine knows what they are getting recovery disks for. It's really nice to make a test account to run all the updates rather than hand them the Snow Leopard disk.

2. Set up your Snow Leopard Mac to add one admin account named test with no password and delete any other accounts using the test account. Reboot into single user mode by holding command + s and type these exactly:

    /sbin/mount -uw /
    cd /var/db
    srm .AppleSetupDone
    cd dslocal/nodes/Default/users
    srm test.plist
    cd /Users
    rm -rf test
    halt

You can now boot the mac to see the setup welcome movie plays and quit the assistant a few steps in using command + q when it starts asking name questions and it will shut down with no account created but all the applications preserved. It will remember your wifi settings, so delete those before starting step 2 or use ethernet/a safe public wifi to run updates if you're worried about that sort of thing.

Zeroing out the drive is typically done for security purposes, but there is also another benefit to zeroing out an SSD - performance. The firmware of an SSD does a lot of complicated tricks to increase disk performance and reliability, but they become less effective the more data the drive has to retain. Since deleting a file or reformatting a disk does not actually turn the bits on the disk back to zero, the drive firmware must still manage that data. If you zero out the drive, you allow the firmware to stop managing all that data and in turn it's able to offer better performance on the data that you have.