[SOLVED] Need to disable hard drive in Mac (or make it not boot) - Help

[nathannitz]

Ok so here's my problem. My mom is giving me her PowerBook G3, which was previously my dad's. She wants her data wiped from it. There are a lot of programs on it that I don't want to have to download and re-install on it. To get rid of her data, I am planning to FileVault her account, erase it, wipe the free space, and be on my way. I know that's not truly secure, but I'm not selling off the PB and only want it for the applications. What I want to do after wiping her account though is disable the hard drive, or at least make the boot partition not mount.

Is there a way I can make the drive not mount in terminal, or in the Open Firmware?

I found through testing on my G3 iMac that you can set the Mac to network boot, and it will just show a blinking "network globe" icon.

The system is a PowerBook G3 Pismo 400, 512MB RAM, 40GB hard drive, OS 10.3.9 Panther.

Thanks ahead for the help. I really appreciate it.

 

[mdmcaf]

I would say that the best/easiest way to do this would be to create a new user account, get a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner (or a similar disk cloning utility, I think that CCC is paid-for-software right now) and create an image of the machine by selecting everything except your mom's user folder (and anywhere else she may be keeping important/sensitive data). Then, put an OS X install disc that's compatible with the PowerBook and use disk utility to secure erase the hard drive (the 3 pass solution is usually good enough, but you might want to do more than that).

After you're done with that, reapply the image the cloning software has created and you're all set.

Reapplying the image might be the trickiest thing to do, I think that CCC has the ability to directly apply the image to the drive while the machine is running (but I'm not totally sure on that), but you might have to remove the drive and put it in another Mac to put the disk image on it.