How can I wipe an external hard drive clean using Mac OS X?
You’d use Disk Utility, which is in the Applications/Utilities folder (or just use Spotlight and search for Disk Utility). Click on the hard drive on the left that you wish to erase (If it’s external it’ll have the yellow Firewire Drive icon) then click on the erase tab. Choose the volume format (Mac OS Extended if you are going to use it on your Mac), name the drive, then click Erase. If you want to completely zero out the hard drive for security reasons, click on security options for some options there. You can also do a 7 and 35 pass re-write that writes random numbers over the data so it can’t be recovered. It will take forever though.
