Before I ditch an old Mac

[question everything]

a Performa that I have stopped using five years ago..

I will have to carry it to the special recycling unit (and pay for it) but how can I make sure that there is nothing on the HD? Do I need to remove the mother board and smash it with a hammer, as I've read someplace?

Since I have not used it for five years whatever personal data there are old still..

P.S - still a Mac User, I just replaced it with an OS X dual processor..

[Auggie]

1. I took a hammer to an old CX a few years back

I paid $3000 for it new and ended up beating the crap out of it.

[Poiuyt]

2. You don't need to smash the mother board, just the HD

At least that's the way I understand.

If you don't need to resort to such drastic measures, you can restart your Performa from a Mac install disk and reformat your disk. Use the disk utility application (I forget what it's called in OS 8-9) and zero out all data. Do this several times.

[question everything]

3. Thanks, will do that (nt)

[eppur_se_muova]

4. If you have Norton Utilities, there is a "secure erase" option ...

but I forget exactly how to access it.

Any disk utility that give you the option of *fully* reformatting the disk will pretty well destroy any info on it, but reformatting three times is even better.

There is no point in destroying the board, there is absolutely no data on the board once the power is disconnected. Only the floppies & hard drive keep data without power (they are magnetic, not electronic).

Have you considered Freecycle? Believe it or not, there are people who still use Macs that old.

[bullimiami]

5. more secure to smash it if you are worried.

[GoneOffShore]

6. Don't smash it!!

Norton Utilities erases data to NSA standards, so use that to erase all the files, then reformat the drive. Then donate the machine to someplace that needs a puter to do word processing, spreadsheets and other stuff. Just because it isn't all that fast anymore, doesn't mean that there is someone out there who can't make use of it.

JM2¢

[politicat]

7. You can also take the hard drive out...

build a large electromagnet, and put the drive inside the field of the electromagnet. (You could use a strong rare earth, but electros are cheap to build.)

Leave it a couple hours. Put it back in the machine. If you can boot, use the magnet again. Repeat until it's not bootable. (Boot sectors are usually the last ones to be corrupted on old SCSI disks, so if the boot sector is corrupted, the rest will be, too.)