So on July 4th I was talking to my neighbors when one of them offered me a job. He has a few mac's in his possesion with personal info on them that he wants removed then have the rest erase. I am new to macs but I still took the job.
It's a G4 with 1GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM and 60GB HDD (ATA) and a CD drive which I have removed all the media and documents that would be important to him. I want to bring it back to factory settings so I can either sell it or donate it to a local charity for computer education for the less wealthy.
So here's my questions:
Is there a boot and nuke like program for mac that I will be able to use?
Where would I go about getting an OSX disc to run a clean install?
Doesn't seem like anything is working can't get a USB or CD to be recognized when choosing boot device. It runs OS 9 btw. I'm gonna try takig it apart and throwing it's hardd drive in my linux machine and nuking it from there.
If it runs OS, then you can actually copy that partition (only the data is needed) to a firewire drive or CD (hold 'C' I believe to boot from the CD). Once booted from the other drive, then you can Wipe it. If you want to actually reinstall the OS, then you can get a copy of OS9 (get the retail version!) from ebay for fairly cheap. I'm sure you could grab it from Other places, but I'll stick to less nefarius examples. ;-)
Note: If that drive is an original, then it'll likely be on its last legs anyway. A couple years ago I picked up one of these for a multi-boot, gaming toy and in the last year and a half had every original (Maxtor if you can believe it!) drive fail. Even my 10+ y/o WD ended up dying on me in this thing.
Well if you want to buy any of the PowerPC OS X versions directly from apple then expect to pay a big premium for the privilege - afaik they sell Leopard install disks for $130 (compared for the $0 for Mavericks).