[jigilypuff]

My friend wants his hard drive deleting but doesnt know how to, i was wonderin could i download a hard drive cleaner and save it to a pen drive then load it on his computer. Would that work?

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You will not be able to purge the hard drive if it is also the boot drive. So you would need to boot from another disk or from the Pen drive first - which means the Pen drive would have to be set up as a bootable drive before hand.

You can also boot to a bootable CD then purge the disk, but a badguy could still easily retrieve the data as it is not overwritten, the space is simply marked as available. The best bet would be to install that drive in an enclosure attached to another computer, or installed in the other computer as a secondary drive (not boot drive), then run a "wipe" program it, such as Eraser. This program writes a series of 1s and 0s in every sector of the disk, effectively overwriting any data previously stored on it. I recommend this procedure for anyone getting rid of a hard drive that previously stored personal data on it.

[Digerati]

You will not be able to purge the hard drive if it is also the boot drive. So you would need to boot from another disk or from the Pen drive first - which means the Pen drive would have to be set up as a bootable drive before hand.

You can also boot to a bootable CD then purge the disk, but a badguy could still easily retrieve the data as it is not overwritten, the space is simply marked as available. The best bet would be to install that drive in an enclosure attached to another computer, or installed in the other computer as a secondary drive (not boot drive), then run a "wipe" program it, such as Eraser. This program writes a series of 1s and 0s in every sector of the disk, effectively overwriting any data previously stored on it. I recommend this procedure for anyone getting rid of a hard drive that previously stored personal data on it.

[rshaffer61]

How about something like Dban Digerati?

[Digerati]

The Heidi Eraser uses DBAN technologies but with a GUI front end. Most find that easier.

http://www.dban.org/download (see the complementary products section)

[rshaffer61]

Look like a great little program.
May have to download it just to have in my arsenal of programs.