Hard Drive Blanking

[[GSV]Trig]

Whats the best way to blitz a drive, got some old machines here that we're more or less giving away, the boss wants them totally blanking and wants to make sure that information cant be gotten back off them...

[Moby-Dick]

I'm sure there will be one below

http://www.dirfile.com/freeware/drive.htm

make sure you have one that makes a number of passes ( that is they set everey bit of data to 1 then back to 0 again )
9 used to be the minimum.

however it can still bep ossible to recover data on it , but you'd have to REALLY want to get the data off it.

An industrial shredder is the best way

[5lab]

hmm, you want something that will put RANDOM 0s and 1s on several times, then wipe all to 0, that should make it pretty impossible to read..

[SourceQuench]

The best thing to do it the data is sensitive is to physically destroy the hard disks (or use a degausser). If I was given a free computer without a hard disk, I wouldn't complain

However, if you must erase the hard disks anyway, another software recommendation: Darik's Boot and Nuke - a bootable floppy (old skool!) or ISO that will automatically start erasing all local hard disks it can find.

Find it at http://dban.sourceforge.net/

HTH