From the Image Format pop-up menu, select DVD/CD Master. Then select File: New: Disk Image FromĪ Save dialog box appears. Select the disc from Disk Utility’s left column.
Mac OS X Install DVD if your DVD drive can only record to single-layer DVDs.)įirst, launch Disk Utility and mount the CD or DVD. (One caveat: Keep in mind that you can’t create a bootable copy of a The simple way to create aĭuplicate is to use Disk Utility to make a disk image and then burn a new disc. Worried about your OS X Install DVD getting damaged, or want a copy to take on a trip? You could burn a copy from the Finder, but you wouldn’t be able to boot from it when you were done. This is an easy way to protect important documents on your computer. Select AES-128 from the Encryption pop-up menu in the Save dialog box. That’s it.Īnother useful aspect of disk images is that you can password-protect them. Give the image file a name, and click on Save when prompted. In the window that appears, navigate to the desired folder and then click on Image. To create an image file, launch Disk Utility and select File: New: Disk Image From Folder. In the future, you can use the Secure Empty Trash command (Finder: Secure Empty Trash) to thoroughly delete files from the Trash. Disk Utility targetsįiles that you’ve deleted, leaving your other files untouched. In the sheet that appears, pick the desired number of erasure passes.
Select the volume, choose the Erase tab, and click on the Erase Free Space button. Disk Utility can help in this situation, too. If you’re concerned that something sensitive you already deleted might still be recoverable but you don’t want to erase the entire drive, never fear. Unless you work for the CIA, the Zero Out Data option (which is one pass) should be sufficient (see screenshot). But be aware that more passes take more time. When you select multiple passes, the drive is erased multiple times to remove all data traces. In this sheet, Disk Utility gives you a number of erasure options, including Zero Out Data, 7-Pass Erase, and 35-Pass Erase.
So if you want to make sure that all existing data is truly gone, click on Security Options instead. It’s not easy to access files erased in this way, but a knowledgeable hacker (or a disk-recovery service) could ferret them out. Your Mac now considers the space free and will write over the data as new information is added. What’s gone is the catalog directory, or the “pointers,” to the files. The disk will nowĮmpty, even though your data is actually still there. The quick and easy way is to select a volume, choose the Erase tab, and click on the Erase button. For a 3-figure sum they should be able to get your data back if it’s humanly possible, and should only charge if they succeed.Whether you’re selling your old computer or cleaning out your virtual desk before moving to another job, sometimes you want to erase everything that’s on your hard drive.
Or, you could just find a professional data recovery firm. After the first run, running Spinrite might well enable it to succeed completely on a second pass. This is a good option if you fear your disk is could die completely at any moment, allowing you to recover as much data as possible while you can. You can then rerun it as many times as you like and it’ll just retry the sectors it has so far failed to read. In a first pass it’ll read everything it can and keep a log of any sectors it couldn’t. If you can boot into Linux of any flavour then ddrescue will clone your hard disc to another. However, Spinrite costs $89, but you get a lifetime personal licence and a money back guarantee if it disappoints. If it was a transient error from a physical jolt or a voltage spike during a write and the disk is otherwise in good health, you can continue using it.
It’s far more persistent than any OS or the drive’s internal error recovery logic. Spinrite can often recover unreadable sectors by doing its own error correction on the aggregate data accumulated from many reads. Unless you can boot your iMac into Linux and DOS utilities (I don’t know whether that’s possible) you’ll need to take out the hard disk and temporarily attach it to a PC. Take a look at Advanced Hard Disk Tools in the Restarters Wiki.
File system repair utilities are of limited use in such cases. It sounds like you’re disk has got physical surface defects.