How can I wipe my iMac hard drive?

[Bobby McBobberson]

I'm currently trying to wipe the hard drive of an old iMac I recently received from a family member.  It currently is running 10.9.5 Mavericks.  It's original os is 10.6.8 snow leopard.  Whenever I restart it and his Command, it brings me to the boot menu but there is no Recovery Partition.  Just the Macintosh HD.  Every where I read it says I have to go into the recovery Partition to wipe the drive, but since it isn't there, what do I do?  Can I create a recovery Partition like you can do in Windows?

[Himommies]

Do you want to delete the OS too

[ProjectBox153]

What are you wanting to do? reinstall the OS?

[Bobby McBobberson]

1 minute ago, Himommies said:

Do you want to delete the OS too

No it would be best to factory reset so the computer is basically new

[Bobby McBobberson]

5 minutes ago, Jamiec1130 said:

What are you wanting to do? reinstall the OS?

I'd like to just do a factory reset, so that the os is still there but all of the previous owners files are gone

[mrchow19910319]

@DrMacintosh  I think someone needs your help. 

[Guest]

When you boot into recovery mode `CMD + R` at startup in the menu bar (top bar) there should be a option for disk utility within this you should reformat the drive and call it Macintosh HD then close disk utility and there should be the option to reinstall macOS, if there isn't a copy of the OS already present it will prompt for a Wi-Fi login to download then install.

[mrchow19910319]

Like @D14RAP said, just hold command + r when booting and reinstall the damn system. 

 

Then your mac will be wiped out and act like new. 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, mrchow19910319 said:

Like @D14RAP said, just hold command + r when booting and reinstall the damn system. 

 

Then your mac will be wiped out and act like new. 

True, I wouldnt waste any time on a cleaning software that takes ages to wipe the hard drive. At leaste reinstalling the OS is quicker (depends on the speed of the HDD).