Aaron Sumner

How to restore a Macintosh hard drive to its factory settings

Last week I needed to restore six MacBooks to their factory default settings, deleting all data, accounts, network settings, and so on. Here’s the procedure I used. It results in a pristine Mac hard drive, right down to the multilingual welcome message and setup assistant to get started. If you’re getting ready to sell an old Mac, I recommend following these steps to give the buyer as much of a new Mac experience as possible, while also protecting your personal data from strangers.

None of this is new information necessarily, but unfortunately many of the support discussion boards that will be among the first results in a search provide a great deal of misinformation, and some steps will vary depending on whether you’re restoring to Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6. This is an attempt to bring everything to one page (and document for my own future reference).

What you’ll need:

The steps:

Boot the Mac from the installer disc. To do this, start your Mac while holding down the C key on your keyboard. Insert the disc to boot. In a few minutes you should see the language selection screen for the Mac OS X installer. Select your preferred language to continue.

Erase your hard drive. Select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu and select your hard drive. Note that secure reformatting techniques can be very time-intensive. I went with the Zero Out Data option, which took about 40 minutes to complete on a 160 GB hard drive.

Install your operating system. If you’ve ever installed a fresh copy of your operating system, this step should feel pretty straightforward. Complete the steps to install Mac OS on the computer, using default settings. I skipped the disc installer validation step because I knew my disc did not have any problems, but if you want the extra sense of security plan on letting this step run for awhile.

Enable the root user. When the operating system installer is done, restart your computer, but boot it again from the installer disc by holding down the C key on your keyboard during startup. If you accidentally boot from the hard drive, wait for the welcome video to play through, then press command-Q to quit the installer and shut down your computer. Start up again while holding down the C key to retry booting from the installer.

Select your language again, then under Utilities choose the Reset Password tool. Select the System Administrator (root) account and assign it a temporary password. You’ll just be using this during setup, and this password will be removed before you’re done. Write the password down, if necessary; you’ll need to enter it several times as you install updates to the operating system and any other software you install. Click Save, then quit the Reset Password tool.

Reboot in single user mode. At this point you should still be booted from the installer disc. Restart your computer, and this time hold down command-S to boot into single user mode. If you’re not used to seeing your Mac’s Unix guts, this step can feel daunting. You’re going to enter a few commands here to trick the Mac into thinking it’s all set up, and thus not try to walk you through the setup assistant each time.

When you see the % prompt followed by a cursor, begin typing the following. Do not type the % that starts each line—I’ve included it for context. Press return after carefully typing each line to process that command.

% /sbin/fsck -fy
% /sbin/mount -uw /
% touch /private/var/db/.AppleSetupDone
% exit

After typing the last command, your computer should begin booting in a more familiar fashion. In a moment you’ll see a login screen. Use the System Administrator account. The username will be root, and the password will be what you set in the Reset Password utility a few moments ago.

Make any network connections you’ll need to download software updates at this time. Again, these are just temporary and will be removed by the end of the procedure. (If I had this to do over, I would have moved my operation next to my router and plug in directly to an Ethernet port for a bit of a speed boost over my 802.11n wireless connection.)

Install software from the Applications Installer disc. If you haven’t done so already, you can eject your operating system installer disc (don’t put it away yet; you’ll use it again in a bit). Insert the Applications Installer disc that was included with your Mac. This disc probably includes at least the iLife software bundle, which is included on new Macs but does not get installed with the regular operating system. Run the installer as normal. You probably will not need to reboot afterward, but if you do let the computer boot to the login screen and log in again as root to continue. You can eject the Applications Installer disc when done with this step.

Run software updates. Strictly speaking, this is an optional step. You can skip it if you want to leave the hard drive as it was when you first opened your Mac. I opted to bring everything up-to-speed, including the operating system itself and the bundled iLife software. (Specifically, I updated the version of iLife that came with the computer; I didn’t install the paid upgrade to iLife ’11.)

Run Software Update (under the Apple menu) to download and install available updates for the computer. You’ll probably need to do this several times, as some updates are dependent on others. You’ll also need to restart your computer at least a couple of times, logging in each time using the root user. This will probably be the most time-intensive step of the process. On my high-speed cable Internet connection, I spent at least an hour downloading and installing update packages.

Once Software Update tells you your computer has no updates at this time, you’re in the home stretch.

Re-enable the setup assistant and welcome video. You’ll need to get back into your Mac’s command line one more time, but this time you can just use Terminal. It’s located in Applications > Utilities. Open Terminal and carefully type everything following the #:

# rm /private/var/db/.AppleSetupDone

Press return to process. What you’ve done is remove a file that your Mac looks for to see whether you’ve completed the Setup Assistant or not. You can quit out of Terminal now.

Re-disable the root user. Launch Directory Utility. This utility has been moved from its old home in Applications > Utilities; now you’ll need to open the top level of your hard drive and navigate to System > Library > Core Services > Directory Utility (this directory is not searchable in Spotlight). If necessary, click the padlock and enter your temporary root password to make changes. Under the Edit menu, select Disable Root User. Quit out of Directory Utility.

Reset the root user. Insert the Mac OS X installer disc, if necessary, and boot from it once more. Under the Utilities menu, select Reset Password. Select the root user and press the Reset button to remove network settings, among other things that are no longer needed.

Check your work. Restart the computer from the hard drive you’ve just reset. Hold down the mouse button to eject the installer media and boot from the hard drive. If all went according to plan, you should see the Mac OS X welcome video, followed by the first step of the setup assistant. Press command-Q to quit the assistant and shut down your Mac. Congratulations, your Mac’s hard drive looks brand new!

Cloning (optional)

If you need to restore several computers, as I did, I strongly recommend cloning the hard drive in the computer you just restored to the other computers. I did this using a second Mac (not one I was restoring), an external hard drive, and SuperDuper! backup software, connecting the restored MacBook to my second Mac via a Firewire cable and starting the restored Mac in target disk mode. I’m sure there are countless other ways I could have done this. Cloning and other backup techniques are beyond the scope of this article, though I’ve included a few links in the references section below.

References:

. Questions or comments? Let me know what you think.