MacOS – Securely Erase All User Data on an Old iBook

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I have an old iBook (Model A1007) that I would like to donate, but first I need to delete all of the last user's data so that it is not recoverable. With Windows machines, I usually do this by running a live Linux USB or CD and then using the "shred" tool to overwrite the hard drive some number of times with random data.

Unfortunately, I have been having trouble running live Linux on this Mac, as per this post: booting an iBook from a live linux usb drive. Booting from a CD instead hasn't seemed to have given me more useful results.

It seems that if I were to purchase the Mac OS 10.4 installer disk, it might be able to do what I need, though since I am doing this just to get rid of the computer, it seems like a bit of an excessive investment for what I am trying to do.

My problem is similar to this one: Securely wipe all user data from iBook G4 / OSX 10.4?. That user had three proposed solutions

  1. Connect the computer to another Mac. I'd rather not, as I don't have another Mac.

  2. Clone the entire computer to an external disk and then run it off that. This seems like it is going to likely be a big project involving lots of debugging (and somehow finding a blank external hard drive, which I would prefer to avoid as well).

So my questions are:

  1. Is there some free way to either run Linux on this old iBook and use that to wipe the data?

  2. If not, is there some other free way to securely delete the data from the iBook?

  3. If neither 1 nor 2, is there a way that will minimize hassle and expense to clean this computer so that I can get rid of it?

I'm not above breaking this thing open and physically destroying the hard drive, if I must. I'd just rather use software means if its possible (and not too expensive).

Best Answer

You need to boot the iBook from supported boot media (like a compatible or retail PPC Mac OS X installer CD or DVD) to do this. Another way is using PPC compatible Linux, but an older version for the G4 CPU. Ubuntu 9.x is a good candidate, as is YellowDog Linux. Gentoo is known to have a working ISO image, ready to burn, but that probably is harder to track down. Booting from USB was not really supported, some OpenFirmware versions did make it available, but it was flaky at best. Machines that were the most reliable regarding USB boot were the G5 Towers and G5 iMacs.

Keep in mind that before you do all this you may want to ensure you have the latest firmware updates installed. While there haven't been any updates for a decade, it is still possible that a previous owner has not installed them all, and you can't do it without a Mac OS installation.

For reference, a link to a known working Linux CD ISO image (I have a PPC G4 1.2Ghz white iBook here as well, works with that CD): http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/ports/releases/9.04/release/ubuntu-9.04-alternate-powerpc.iso

This is the 'alternate' image, which should allow you to boot a bit faster on low-memory machines and has a few extra tools to allow you to wipe the disk (I'd suggest just writing zeroes to the whole thing, or if you are paranoid use /dev/urandom and write that to the /dev/hda or /dev/sda). When it boots, you can just ignore the installer and move directly to 'recovery shell' to get going.

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