Hard Drive scrubber

[Piperchris18]

One of our neighbors is giving me his old computer because he is upgrading. I'm going to give this computer to a friend because I don't need it. He wants all the information on the hard drive wiped (for obvious reasons). Does anyone know a good, FREE program that cleans the hard drive and is fairly easy to use?

Thanks for your help,
Christopher

 

[Zoron]

Find out who made the hard drive, then go to their website. You should be able to download a "Low Level Format" utility of some sort. This will write zeros to all sectors of the hard drive... overwriting any data on the drive. If you want to be even safer (if you're that paranoid about someone getting the data), you can make 2 or 3 passes with the low-level format. That should pretty much eliminate the possibility of anyone recovering the data short of data forensics.