How to wipe a hard drive

I have three hard drives hooked up to my laptop right now, totaling 360 gigs. One is my old hard drive that's malfunctioning, I bought an enclosure and have it plugged in. I copied everything I could (a lot of the sectors are bad, but I got mostly all my data), and now I want to nuke it. Only reason is I have to send it back to Dell, and I don't want them seeing anything on there or anything....I know they wouldn't just look through my hard drive, but still just to be sure I have a lot of stuff that if anybody saw they could take like all my money haha......

Anyway, any suggestions?

R-Wipe & Clean

giant magnets?

boot and nuke

make sure you format multiple times for maximum security.

If you reformat many times, will it be impossible to retrieve info from the hard disk?

it depends on the level of format. A quick format for example just erases the table of contents, leaving all of your data in tact but just unreadable by normal means. making it VERY easy for your data to be recovered in the wrong hands. A full format will write 0's to every bit, still leaving it recoverable but harder. There are advanced formatting tools that write random 1's and 0's many times over to make it almost completely unrecoverable.

Download BCWipe-PD from Jetico and create an ISO that does U.S. DoD standards with all options checked.

[quote631046b40e="mnx12"]giant magnets?[/quote631046b40e]

thatly work, ive tried it )

if you can find a utility that will write zeroes that is more than adequate. the expense involved in recovering data from a zeroed drive makes it unreasonable in pretty much any circumstance. there is no need for this 34-pass tin foil hat waste of time bullcrap.

Which is why BCWipe-PD is ideal... It wipes the entire drive with all zeros... Only takes 7 passes (U.S. DoD standard).

[quotea9fd63c1df="h3x"]Which is why BCWipe-PD is ideal... It wipes the entire drive with all zeros... Only takes 7 passes (U.S. DoD standard).[/quotea9fd63c1df]

or u can always use magnetrs, that u can trust fo sho

[quotedab1f2338a="kylej608"][quotedab1f2338a="h3x"]Which is why BCWipe-PD is ideal... It wipes the entire drive with all zeros... Only takes 7 passes (U.S. DoD standard).[/quotedab1f2338a]

or u can always use magnetrs, that u can trust fo sho[/quotedab1f2338a]
Unless you have access to some extremely powerful magnets, that's not an effective method of drive erasure, especially with the drive case intact. The whole magnet thing is highly overrated, at least with ordinary magnets.

u use one of those nail ones that have wheels on them that u wheel around to pick up nails, mines is like 3 ft long

[quoteaa50eaabda="kylej608"]u use one of those nail ones that have wheels on them that u wheel around to pick up nails, mines is like 3 ft long[/quoteaa50eaabda]

mine too ;)

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Yeah, but you won't be able to reach the back with that. ;)