Wiping hard drive

[rob4001]

I want to sell my hard drive but securely wipe it first to clean out personal details from it. Is there any freeware programmes that can do this?

Thanks

[strike-down]

Dban

Edit:
http://www.dban.org/

[aidanjt]

You don't even need dban, any linux livecd will do. Use "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda" or whichever device node the hard drive is at.

[james_d]

Or shred from a live-cd. Works much the same as dban.

shred -n 3 -z -v /dev/sda is the command I usually use - three random passes, a zero pass at the end, and a -v to see how far it's going.

[merple]

eraser will let you do that from inside windows without having to burn a disk.