I'm giving an old computer to a friend and I want to completely obliterate the hard drive, how do I do this?

Answer 1

Use Darik's Boot and Nuke, it will completely erase your hard drive and overwrite it again making it virtually impossible to get anything off of it.

Answer 2

It depends how much work you'd like to do.
You can simply delete it all easily by formatting the drive. If your friend's curious enough, an undelete program could get those files back.

If you're more paranoid, you can delete and then overwrite the files with something else. The mildly paranoid will only overwrite once, the very paranoid may overwrite nine times or more. This would make even a data forensics expert frustrated. The more you overwrite, the less they can get back.
(The programs mentioned here should all be able to do overwrites for you, so you don't spend hours yourself. I usually visit http://www.tucows.com when I need programs like this, I don't bother to keep them around.)

Don't forget to reinstall the operating system if you wipe the drive, so the computer's useful to your friend when you're done.

If you have something on that computer which ABSOLUTELY couldn't get out (do you work with classified information, or confess to illegal activities?), I'd suggest simply removing and destroying the drive, and replacing it with another one. Once you're done overwriting the drive, take a large magnet to it and/or break it altogether.

Answer 3

The easiest way to do this would be to format the hard drive, then remove it from the computer and smash it.

But I prefer the format hard drive, boot with second hard drive and then use my windows based Simple File Shredder and Gutmann (x35 passes) the the entire newly formatted hard drive.

In most cases a simple reformat will prevent most people from recovering the data that was on your computer.

Answer 4

Format the drive. For the non-professional the data is gone forever.

Answer 5

You have to format the hard drive.

This site explains how to do this in 3 easy steps
(it even covers common error messages)

http://freepctech.com/pc/001/002.shtml

Hope it Helps
LLap

Answer 6

Formatting it should do it but I whould format several times if you had alot of private stuff on it. Or you can use this program - Hard disk scrubber

http://idtheft.about.com/od/methodsofthef1/a/HD_Cleaning.htm

here is url

Answer 7

format your hard disk and reinstall windows

http://yanswers.blogspot.com/2006/10/windows-reinstallation.html

Answer 8

fdisk works pretty well to delete the main partition.

Answer 9

www.killdisk.com
here you go :)