How do I securely wipe my Mac?

How to Wipe a Mac With an M1 Chip

Table of Contents

Turn on your Mac and continue to press and hold the power button until the startup options window comes up.
When the Utilities window appears, select Disk Utility.
In the sidebar, choose Macintosh HD.
Click the “Erase” button, then select a file system format and enter a name for it.

Can you wipe an encrypted hard drive Mac?

You can erase an encrypted volume without a password, so long as you don’t care about losing its contents. The newly formatted drive is available for use and has no password attached. On the matter of the sidebar: If you don’t see the sidebar in Disk Utility, choose View > Show Sidebar.

What is the Diskutil command on Mac?

diskutil is the command line version of Disk Utility, the macOS application used to manage hard drives. Just like Disk Utility, you can use the command to format disks, erase drives and more.

How do I unlock my encrypted Mac hard drive without password?

You’d go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > FileVault > unlock the padlock with your username and password to unlock it. Then it’s unlocked. To turn off encryption select ‘Turn off FileVault’. Without the username and password or recovery key, there isn’t a way to unlock the Mac.

How do I wipe my Mac before recycling?

Here’s how to do it.

Shut down your Mac.
Turn on your Mac and immediately press and Command and R.
You may be prompted to select a user and log in with the password for that account.
From here, you’ll be presented with a utilities window.
Select Macintosh HD from the sidebar.
Click Erase and input a new name and format.

What does Secure Erase do?

Secure Erase completely wipes clean all of the data found on a drive and does not allow that data to be retrieved. It is a permanent solution that provides the maximum level of security for sensitive data that must be erased.

Can you factory reset a Mac with FileVault?

FileVault Encryption helps prevent others from getting access to your files, but you’ll want to turn it off to reset your Mac. You’ll be erasing the hard drive in a few minutes anyway, so it’s fine to turn this off. To do this, open System Preferences and click on “Security & Privacy” in the top row.

Can I erase an encrypted drive?

1. Run the program, and click the encrypted hard drive and choose Delete Partition at the left hand. 2. Select a method to delete the partition, hit OK.

How do I erase a disk from the terminal Mac?

To erase a disk from the command line on the Mac, we’ll use the familiar “diskutil” command with the eraseDisk verb and other appropriate flags to specify options for how we want to erase the disk, and to identify which disk is to be erased.

How do I erase a USB drive on a Mac using terminal?

Method 2. Using Mac Command Line:

Connect the USB drive to Mac and press CMD + Space key to run Spotlight.
When the Terminal window opens up, type diskutil list and you’ll find out which is your USB drive.
Type the command sudo diskutil eraseDisk FAT32 MBRFormat /dev/disk2 where.

How do I wipe my Mac without the FileVault password?

Erase via Recovery. Hold down Command-R at startup (Option by itself won’t work on a FileVault-protected Mac), and then erase the FileVault partition using Disk Utility, and then reinstall macOS.

How long does it take to erase a Mac?

9. It will take a few moments for the disk to erase. Once it’s done, click the Apple logo in the top-left corner of the screen, and click “Quit Disk Utility.”

What is the difference between secure erase and sanitize?

Secure Erase is different from Sanitize because it only deletes the mapping table but will not erase all blocks that have been written to. Sanitize will delete the mapping table and will erase all blocks that have been written to. Therefore, Secure Erase is faster to complete than Sanitize.

Does formatting a hard drive remove encryption?

By using whole disk encryption on an SSD, all of the data on the drive will become unreadable without the decryption key. By formatting the drive and removing the encryption key, the SSD can be securely disposed of without the risk of data remaining on the drive.

How do I remove encryption from my hard drive?

To delete your Encryption folder:

Click My Drives in the Command panel.
Select your drive.
Click Security in the Command panel.
Click Encryption.
Click Delete Encryption folder.
Click Open Encryption folder, decrypt and save files and folders stored in the Encryption folder, and close the Encryption folder.

Why won’t my Mac let me erase the disk?

If you are trying to format the Mac hard drive or its volumes – Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD – Data, you will inevitably see the Erase button grayed out in Disk Utility. That’s because you can’t erase the drive you are currently running from, and you need to boot into Mac Recovery mode to format the Mac startup disk.

How do I wipe a USB drive?

How to wipe a USB drive safely in Windows 10/8/7:

Launch the software, go to Tools and select Disk Wipe.
Choose Wiping Type.
Select the disk or partitions you want to erase.
Choose Wiping Method according to the safety level and wipe speed, and Start disk wiping.