I have an old pc i want to put away but would rather clear the hard drive, whats the best way please?

Question

I have an old pc i want to put away but would rather clear the hard drive, whats the best way please?

Answer 1

Killdisk. It completely wipes the hard drive. However, most computer repair places will wipe a HD for about $20-30.

Answer 2

I am drilling holes in my old HD with my drill motor so it is no longer useable nor readable for anyon eto retreive my personal data.

Its too old to use anyway.

But you can format it a few times if you want to.

Answer 3

Darik's nuke and boot, get it from ultimate boot disk.

The milatary uses a similar method for erasing their HDD's so when you use this you should know that your disk is completely unrecoverable.

Answer 4

Install another operating system such as Ubuntu. That will scourge your drive and replace the old system. You can still use the hard drive but there will be nothing personal of yours on it, just a clean install of another system.  Darik's Boot and Nuke will make the drive permanently unusable, a new Linux system on it will leave it alone for others to use.

It should take about 20 minutes to install, Boot and Nuke takes about the same time but will kill the drive.

Answer 5

Get a copy of Eraser from www.heidi.ie. Use it to overwrite all your data files, don't worry about the windows system. It's FREE!

Answer 6

not matter what software you use there will be a way to recover it. If you don't want to sell the hard-drive just destroy it to avoid any chance of it being read, if you want to sell it then use one of the better programs and hope for the best.

Answer 7

Magnets+power drill+fire+corrosive acid+sledgehammer

That should be more than enough to completely wipe it clean.

Unless you'd actually like to use the harddrive in the future, in which case you should completely ignore this.

Answer 8

boot from cd, reinstall windows and configure your soft ware. will take 1 - 2 hours to reinstall windows