How to completely erase Mac Pro hard drive.

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How to completely erase Mac Pro hard drive.

In the Recovery Mode terminal, how can I erase my 2008 Mac Pro's drive? I've tried tampering with stuff in Recovery Mode on my MacBook Air, but the drive appears to be read only when in Recovery. Talking about OS X Lion here. Any help would be appreciated. Using a Windows/Linux keyboard, so if there are any Keyboard shortcuts, if you could use Windows layout instead of Mac, (e.g. Alt, not Cmd) as that would be very helpful. How can I deal with this situation?

Earlier Mac models

Posted on Mar 1, 2024 10:00 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 2, 2024 7:52 AM in response to buggem

First, we need to understand exactly what software you are using.

INTERNET Recovery was first released in Macs after 2011, so you clearly are not using that.

On-disk Recovery HD is a possibility, but you can NOT use that to erase the entire disk, because you would be "cutting off the branch you are standing on."

¿Are you perhaps using Terminal inside Single-User mode? Did you invoke this mode by holding Command-S at startup?

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Answer 2

Mar 2, 2024 11:33 AM in response to buggem

...and there is another important complication.

How do you propose to get a working version of macOS back onto this drive?

without Internet Recovery in its ROM, re-Installing MacOS could be more complex than expected, and force other decisions in the process.

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