How to "erase" a hard drive?

Only companies will have the equipment to scrub an HD. What I would do is to take out the HD, and ask them to put in their own HD. This will mean that they will have to a clean install, but it will protect your private data.

Also Killdisk and Eraser work well.

Hello suzycat1, I would suggest following other member's suggestions..

suzycat1

Nothing should happen to the system you download it to, providing the progam is saved to 'My Documents' or desktop and then burnt to a CD or a USB flash drive.

Bev.

If I might make a suggestion, you could try this.

1.  Use Windows Explorer to find your data and delete it

2.  When your data has been deleted, empty the recycle bin

3.  Go to My Computer, right click on your C: drive, choose Properties, and Tools.  Choose Chkdsk.  Make sure that the option to fix file system errors is marked.  This should give you a message that Chkdsk will run when you restart the computer, so restart to run it.

4.  When Chkdsk has finished and you have your desktop back, go back to My Computer, right click on the C: drive again, Properties, and Tools.  This time choose to run Defrag.  This will take a while so let it run while you are watching TV or something.

When Defrag has finished you will have eliminated the fragmented files, and in the process of performing the defragmentation, you will have overwritten your old deleted data several times.  This will prevent anyone using common commercially available tools from accessing your data.

If you are still worried, Shesagordie mentioned an excellent disk eraser.

You could also try drivescrubber from iolo.com.  It really works.

Formatting (even a full format), re-partitioning, defragging, restoring from an image file and other suggestions here will do little to stop someone determined to get at your old data.  I am constantly called in to do just that for people who have mistakenly done all of these things to their hard drives and can normally recover most, if not all of their data.  To thoroughly erase a drive would take the use of some of the programs mentioned here such as DBAN.  The program you download will create either a bootable CD or disk that you boot to and wipe the drive.  It will NOT affect the drive it is downloaded to. 

And don't be misled by some of the programs that offer secure erase from within a Windows environment.  Unless you boot to a separate disk you can not do an actual secure erase.

Han, with all due respect, I would expect that a large majority of people will have at least some Banking and/or Credit Card information on their computer.  With that in mind it is unconsionable to recommend a less than thorough method of erasing a hard drive.  Considering that the additional work involved would be minor at best and wouldn't incur any additonal cost to the person why would they not go the full route of securely erasing the drive with DBAN (or one of the other programs).  The risk is simply too great.  Using your method I stand a 95% chance of recovering Banking, Credit, or other personal information without working that hard from that hard drive.  Just download DBAN, create the disk, and let it run overnight.  If that is too much work then your priorities are flawed. 

The bottom line is this.  Anyone who isn't willing to follow tried and PROVEN techniques for securely erasing a hard drive are just asking for trouble and deserve to get their information recovered and used against them. 

Just download/use the free version of Active@ Kill Disk :emotion-5:

I have an old Dell Dimension PC that runs on Windows that I want to donate or give away, as I recently upgraded to an Inspiron.  I have heard that even though you delete things and send to recycle bin, that it never really "goes away".  How do I clean out the hard drive so that none of my personal information can be found?

Use the program I suggested/provided a link to in an earlier post (Active@ Kill Disk).

Another good low-level formatting program is DBAN (Google it). 

One particularly good feature about DBAN, is that it doesn't need to be run from a floppy disk.  It can be run from CD, DVD, or even a USB drive :emotion-11: :emotion-5: