Is there a "free" way for me to clean the hard drive on my computer and if not what would you recommend I buy

Question

I am about to donate a computer to someone & want to make sure there is nothing on my hard drive that I have deleted be "accidently" found by them.

Answer 1

Darik's Boot and Nuke it can be used from a floppy or burned to a CD just download the appropriate file. This will clean everything from the hard drive including the OS.
http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Answer 2

Sure. Use a Linux LiveCD. Boot from the CD and use it to erase everything from the computer's hard disk drives.

There are lots of Linux Live CDs available for free:

http://www.sysresccd.org/
http://www.knoppix.org/

There is also Darik's Boot and Nuke, which is specifically designed for this purpose, but you'll need a floppy drive.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Answer 3

The first way you could clean the harddrive is to fdisk or format the disk. There are several commerical brand software platforms that can clean your drive, but if you do a format disk or an fdisk, you should be ok.

Answer 4

The best way I have found so far is either KillDisk or GDisk.
Since GDisk is a pay for, that Leaves KillDisk.
Where I am, we have to satisfy security guidelines from the Federal level, so go to
http://www.killdisk.com/?gclid=CNy_9J70uokCFRUPVAodI0IuPQ
And you must do 7 passes to satisfy the full security guide, and the data is as close to impossible to remove as you can get.

Answer 5

You just can use your windows cd to format everything. But if you are serious about erasing your hard drive until unrecoverable, you can consider Paragon Disk Wiper.

Answer 6

Try low-level formatting your hard drive.

Answer 7

well you cannot delete your hard drives completely erase i suggest you take out of the pc and destroy or whatever you want to do n just buy another hardrive or watever...