Erasing Hard Drives

Clarifications

Available here: http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/
There are 4 options for overwriting data, 1,3,7, and 35 passes. When it's installed it appears in the right-click dropdown menu in Explorer. Thirty five passes will take quite some time but I'm sure your data would be gone.

http://www.dban.org/

fairly small download (5.5MB), burn to CD (it is a live CD)

have the option of how many passes you want (7 passes is good enough, that's what the US Department of Security uses)

DBan Boot & Nuke is by far the best option to use but even with the newest Beta Version it's problematic how well it will work with SATA Drives.

http://www.dban.org/download

Kill Disc tends to work well with all Drive Types but doesn't perform multiple overwrites so it needs to be run a couple of times.

http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm

They are the free options but the Professional Version of Kill Disc is probably the best option available and while it's still possible to recover Data off the Drive it's only the Deepest Forensic Recovery methods that will get this data back. Even then it's likely to be heavily corrupted.

These are the methods used by the Authorities to recover Data in Criminal Matters and go to millions of $ to do for real people so effectively the data is completely destroyed. ;)

http://www.killdisk.com/dod.htm

Col

http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm

I've used it for years. Seems very good to me. Might not be the fastest.

Its Ultimate Boot CD.. Got to know about it from here only.. If my memory serves me right, OH Smeg told me about it.. Anyway, google it and you will get.. It contains all the S/W you will require for this and many other purposes. Very useful.

I was a bit of a Seagull on this one... mea culpa