- #HOW TO CLEAN A MACBOOK DRIVE HOW TO#
- #HOW TO CLEAN A MACBOOK DRIVE DOWNLOAD#
- #HOW TO CLEAN A MACBOOK DRIVE MAC#
You’re going to be wiping out your computer’s hard drive, so the chances of any of your logins sticking around-whether on iCloud, iTunes, or a social media account your favorite browser-is pretty much nil. You won’t get another chance to save those files, so do it now! Step 2: Log Out of everything
Just to be safe, it’s worth your while to spend 20 or 30 minutes looking through your hard drive for stuff you might have forgotten to port over to your new computer. If there are still files on your old computer that you want to save, though, now is the time to do it. If that’s the case, then you’ve probably also already moved all of your old files-from your iTunes library to your Microsoft Word documents-over to your new machine, or at very least onto an external hard drive. The question is, where to start? Step 1: Back up all of your filesĬhances are pretty good that if you are ready to sell or give away your old Mac, you’ve already replaced it and started using a new machine.
#HOW TO CLEAN A MACBOOK DRIVE MAC#
How would you feel if you bought a refurbished Mac from Apple, only to find it loaded with someone else’s files? Cleaning an old Mac and preparing it for new users can take a lot of work, and it’s a job that you should do as courtesy to the people who will be using the machine in the future. When you decide to pass your Mac on to a new owner, you need to make it seem like a new product. Furthermore, the person or organization to whom you are selling or donating your Mac shouldn’t have to deal with deleting all of your files. It’s probably loaded with your personal information, too-information that you don’t want to have falling into a stranger’s hand. If you’re like most people, your Mac is a hub of all of your files, music, pictures, video files, and more. Regardless of what you are planning on doing with a computer you don’t want to use anymore, there is one thing you definitely don’t want to do: sell it or donate it without first cleaning out the hard drive. So you’ve decided to sell your old Mac, give it away to a friend or relative, or donate it to a school or nonprofit. If you booted from a USB disk, click “Continue” to advance to the installer.Steps for Cleaning Your Mac before Selling or Donating Itįor the 2021 version of this guide, covering both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, click here. If you booted from a functioning recovery partition, click the “Reinstall macOS” button. With your information wipe complete, you are now ready to reinstall macOS. If you choose three or five passes, you might want to leave this running overnight. If you opted to wipe your drive securely, this might take a while-30 minutes to an hour is not unreasonable for one pass. Just give your drive a name (I recommend “Macintosh HD”, just for consistency’s sake), then click “Erase” to start the overwriting process. You only need to write over a drive once to securely wipe it, but if you’re paranoid you can also wipe it three or five times.Ĭlick “OK” once you’ve decided, but remember: if your Mac has a solid state drive, you do not need to use these options. Now move the dial up, to randomly write data over your entire drive. You still need to wipe the drive, however, or your files will remain in place, so skip to the end of this step to do so.) (If your Mac has a solid state drive, you can skip this part: your SSD will already securely erase files thanks to TRIM. If you’re wiping a mechanical drive, click “Security Options” in the window that pops up. Click your primary drive, then click “Erase” If not you can find Disk Utility in the menu bar: click Utilities then Disk Utility. To get started, click the Disk Utility option.ĭepending on how you started Recovery Mode, you may be presented with the option to start Disk Utility right away, as seen above.
#HOW TO CLEAN A MACBOOK DRIVE HOW TO#
We’ve shown you how to securely wipe a hard drive with your Mac, and doing so in Recovery Mode isn’t really different from doing so within macOS. If you want a truly clean installation, however, you need to first wipe your hard drive. We recommend backing up files before you do this, just in case, but otherwise you’re ready for step three. Your user accounts and files will stay exactly where they are-only your operating system will be overwritten. If you want to re-install your operating system, but leave your files in place, you can skip this step. RELATED: 8 Mac System Features You Can Access in Recovery Mode Step Two: Securely Wipe Your Hard Drive (Optional) Once you’ve managed to open up the Recovery Mode in some fashion, we can move on to wiping your drive securely.
#HOW TO CLEAN A MACBOOK DRIVE DOWNLOAD#
You can access recovery without a partition using Network Recovery: hold Command+Shift+R while turning on your Mac and it will download the Recovery features for you. Failing that, you can create a bootable USB installer for macOS Sierra, and boot from that by holding “Option” while turning on your Mac. If neither of these options work, don’t panic! You’ve got a couple of options yet.