How to completely erase HD

[sentralorigin]

My friend was trying to erase his HD, so he reformatted, ran this program http://dban.sourceforge.net/ and rewrote over it with random 1's and 0's a dozen times. Even then, the FBI forensics found traces of information about his drug heist. I don't want to make the same mistake he did, but I also do NOT want to destroy the HD by drilling holes in it and tossing it into the Atlantic Ocean. I want to keep it, but I'd like it to be the way when I first bought it, with no way to recover any information. I thought my HD was clean if I deleted all partitions, and reformatted the whole thing, but it turns out it's pretty easy to recover information if you don't somehow clean it with no way of recovering. How can I do this?

 

[jp198780]

only way i know how 2 do it is if you put it as a Slave in the same, or another computer....

 

[robina_80]

wont fdisk work

 

[Shady]

you need to do a Low-level format ie. "write zeros"
goto the website of your HDD brand and you'll find a tool to do this for you
this operation take a lot of time depending on the space of your HDD

but i'm just curious....what do you have to hide that you don't want anyone to know about...?
you can ignore this question if it's something sensitive

 

[meanman]

sounds like you have been a bad boy in which case dont ask for help of law abiding people, find the help you need somewere else!

 

[Saurian]

I believe the Department of Justice standard is to rewrite over previously stored information 21 times in order to completely erase it and make recovery of information impossible for forensics labs. Generally, 7 rewrites is enough to get the data out of reach of software data recovery solutions, but the DoJ I believe stated that for government security it had to write things 21 times to make them dissappear forever. I used to know the code for that info....do a search for it on Google.

Oh yeah, Paper is ALOT easier to get rid of.