How to erase everything on my iMac??

[Dalrymps]

I have an old 'red' iMac, must be nearly 10 years old now. Don't use it anymore as we have a laptop.

I was wanting to sell/give it away but I don't want any of my personal data on it. Ideally I want to erase everything and restore it to factory settings.

Anyone know how to do this?

Don't know where the ''s came from

Bump

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/geeky_stuff/1127345-How-do-I-wipe-all-my-info-from-my-Mac-Book-before-selling-it

Ah thanks, when I click on the link it had instructions for mac os x, my mac only has mac os 9.. Have had a look but can't find equivalent instructions for my os...

MacOS 9 is a bit more difficult. Some info here.

OS 9 is more complicated because some of your personal data is probably in the System Folder, plus other places you might not expect. The easiest thing to do, if you have the original system CDs, is to start from one of those and reinstall everything. The original disk is probably orange and you can start up from it by holding down the C key when you boot up. Then follow the instructions. That's by far the best option, but if you don't have that, chuck away everything on the Desktop, everything in the Documents folder, and everything in the Microsoft folder in the System Folder. Then throw away any folders in the hard drive that aren't the following:

Applications
Control Panels
Documents
Desktop Folder
Finder
System
System Folder
Users

And don't forget to empty the trash!

These computers aren't worth much these days and are only likely to be of interest to someone who knows how to install OS9 anyway, so I'd say don't give yourself a hard time about throwing away so much that you render it useless (until it's reinstalled).

Ah ok thanks for all the advice. Yeah, it seems to be worth naff all which is crazy considering how much I paid for it! Will get on to erasing the stuff, thanks again.