Securely formatting an old hard drive

[Tek7]

Well, in a few days, I'll be sending my old notebook back to Dell. Before I do, I'll be backing up any important data and erasing the hard drive.

My question is: How can I securely format my old notebook's hard drive so there is 0% of anyone ever pulling data from it? I have a lot of sensitive information on the machine, much of it relevant to CGA and ToJ accounts, so I want to make sure it doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

If anyone could recommend any freeware tools to securely format the hard drive to prevent data recovery, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Also, I'd like to leave the Dell recovery partition in tact if possible, but it's not strictly necessary.

 

[Hescominsoon]

Short of physical destruction:

DBAN

 

[Tek7]

Short of physical destruction:

DBAN

Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN") is a self-contained boot disk that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction.

I want to be able to select partitions for secure erasure, though, not just nuke any hard drive the computer detects.

Is there a freeware tool for that?

 

[Hescominsoon]

if you securely erase the data on the partitions the rest is moot.

 

[Hescominsoon]

partitions are logical boundaries not physical ones..if they wanted to do a drive recovery the lack of partitions would not even be visible to them since they go below the partition level.

 

[BassMan449]

You can try Eraser. I personally haven't used it, but I've heard many good things. Check for it on SourceForge

 

[Tek7]

Okay, I have DBAN running on the hard drive in my wife's old desktop computer (after she and I went through and backed up any important data, of course). Once the drive is thoroughly wiped, I'm going to mothball the machine.

I'm also running DBAN on my old notebook computer hard drive.

Both formats should be finished by morning and I should be able to ship my old notebook back to Dell Thursday morning.