Erasing All Contents from an iMac for Recycling

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Erasing All Contents from an iMac for Recycling

I have an iMac (24 inch, Early 2009), OS X Yosemite, version 10.10.5, 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. I'm trying to erase the drive so I can recycle it. I found a process in Support that describes what to do for a machine that has Intel parts (versus Apple silicon) but when I follow I get a message that the machine cannot connect to the server support.apple.com. WiFi is connected. Is there another way to erase without following the Apple protocol?

iMac 21.5″, macOS 15.6

Posted on Sep 17, 2025 04:14 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

HWTech

Level 9

66,962 points

Sep 17, 2025 05:31 PM in response to tjbatok

I highly recommend you create a bootable macOS 10.11 El Capitan USB installer now while you still can.

Create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support

To make sure the data is gone from the internal Hard Drive, you will need to boot from your USB installer. When you use Disk Utility to erase the drive....make sure to also select the option to secure erase the Hard Drive so that zeroes will be written to the entire drive & obliterating any data on it. Or you could boot normally to your internal drive & enable Filevault.....let Filevault finish encrypting the Hard Drive where afterwards a simple erase with Disk Utility will be enough to destroy the data since you will be destroying the encryption key.

If your iMac has just an SSD, then a simple normal erase is sufficient to destroying the data on the SSD since SSDs work differently than Hard Drives.

If your iMac has a Fusion Drive setup, then it has both an SSD and a Hard Drive. You need to use the secure erase on the Hard Drive portion or you need to enable Filevault. If you want to rebuild the Fusion Drive & reinstall macOS afterwards, then you will need the information in the following Apple article (probably not needed if being recycled versus sold, but just in case):

How to fix a split Fusion Drive - Apple Support

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Answer 2

Sep 17, 2025 05:17 PM in response to tjbatok

What to do before you sell, give away, trade in, or recycle your Mac - Apple Support

See the section "If you can't use Erase All Contents and Settings". (Early 2009 iMacs have neither T2 security chips nor Apple Silicon processors.)

Another possibility would be to install macOS, or make a bootable clone of your system, on an external drive. Then you could start up from the external drive and erase the internal drive from Disk Utility. Then just keep the external drive, and erase/reuse it later with the aid of the replacement computer.

You can download an El Capitan kit here, in the form of a .DMG file, if you want to do a "clean install" of Mac OS X on an external drive. (You will need a working copy of Mac OS X, such as your current installation of Yosemite, to mount the disk image and run the installer application.)

How to download and install macOS - Apple Support

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