Use Dban (http://www.dban.org/) to securely eliminate any data off of the drive. Then dispose of the drive at your nearest e-waste facility.

Better yet, wipe it as noted and donate it to a charity - a 160G drive is still very useful for many users and it's a shame to simply dispose of it.

If you use a good program, there is no need to throw the drive away. That would just be a waste of a good drive for no reason.

Better yet, wipe it as noted and donate it to a charity - a 160G drive is still very useful for many users and it's a shame to simply dispose of it.

Donate it to a charity, thanks but no thanks. I'ld rather not donate it to a charity for two reasons.

1) I'm too paranoid about having any of my private data remaining on the drive even after wiping it and the data thus still being recoverable via recovery software. I've had alot of private stuff stored on that drive over the four to five years that it served as my PC's hard drive.

2) The drive is starting to show signs of wear-n-tear and is behaving like it has developped a few bad sectors. Chkdsk used to occasionally run by itself on initial system start up and tell me that it is checking the drive for errors. The system would seemingly shut down normally only to have chkdsk run itself without warning the next time I turn PC on. I never set chkdsk to run myself and don't even know how to do that. Sometimes chkdsk would report that it was fixing errors after completing the scan and on other occasions it would report no errors and allow Windows to boot up normally. I have also had several occasions in the last four months where the system would not start up do to some critical system file being missing or corrupt. The error message would like a file path like this C:\System32\System... I have had to do so many OS Re-Installs in the last four months alone that I have lost count of the total.

Sorry, but I doubt this drive will be useful to anyone.

If you use a good program, there is no need to throw the drive away. That would just be a waste of a good drive for no reason.

Like I said in my original post. I have no use for this drive now, it's too small to serve as the PC's main hard drive and it isn't suitable for the role of back-up/long term file storage media. I have three seperate external USB hard drives that are more suited to that role.

I would agree with ejn63; if you use Kill Disk or DBaN and set them for DoD secure cleaning, there is no way anyone could get data off of the drive anymore and you'd be able to make someone else happy as 160GB is more then enough for a computer that will be used for Internet access, iTunes, etc.

I took a look at both Kill Disk and DBaN. I downloaded DBaN and burned it to a CD-R. I opened and read a few of the text file readme files that were on burned onto the CD. One of them indicated that DBaN only supports IDE and SCSI hard drives, meaning that the program won't do me any good. The hard drive I want to wipe is a SATA drive. Kill Disk is avaliable in both freeware and payware editions, only the payware edition which costs $50.00 meets DoD security standards. The freeware version doesn't meet those standards according to Kill Disk's own website. I am not going to pay $50.00 for a program that I will in all likelyhood use only once and then never use again.

Any other wiping programs out there that I can conscider?

You can get Acronis True Image for about $30 (less for older versions). For me, this is money well spent since it can do so many things, system backup and recovery, disk drive checking, partitioning, and of course, wiping hard drives.