I'm donating an old computer, and want to totally wipe the hard drive.

[jasc15]

A coworker is shipping a bunch of old computers to a school in the Phillipines and I thought it would be a good way to get rid of my old one.  However, there is no way in hell I would let any bit of my personal information loose in the world.

My go-to tech friend tells me that simply using the windows install/restore disc won't necessarily clear all data, and I need to use some sort of HDD wipe tool to make sure it's all gone.  What can you guys recommend for this?  I've come across DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) referenced in a few places so far.  Are there different ways of doing this, or do most of these tools use pretty much the same method for clearing drives?

[millahh]

I've used DBAN.  Definitely effective.

[rumborak]

If you have a way of mounting the drive in another system, you could of course just format it that way.

[jasc15]

I do. I have an IDE to USB cable, which I've been using to move the data to the new machine.  I'm just unsure if formatting will be sufficient to really erase everything.  The existence of things like DBAN makes me think not.

[Chino]

Format c: ?

[kirksnosehair]

Formatting it does not remove any data, it only removes pointers to the data.  In order to truly eradicate the contents of the drive you either need to perform a low-level format, write and overwrite data to every sector on the drive   That's a pain in the ass and why bother when DBAN is quite effective at completely erasing your drive.