A friend of mine is giving her old computer away. Naturally, she doesn't want the existing data on the HD left behind. What is the best process to achieve this, either from the run command or utility?

- Thanks -

There are lots of utilities that do this.

If you're not paranoid, a simple reformat would suffice. That data could easily be recovered if someone really wanted to get it, though.

For more security, zero-fill the hard drive. You can download zero-fill utilities from the hard drive manufacturer, or you could use the erase function of Ranish Partition Manager (http://www.ranish.com/part/). Data deleted in this way could possibly be recovered, but it wouldn't be nearly as easy.

For the very paranoid, try a utility like Darik's Boot and Nuke (http://dban.sourceforge.net/) which makes several passes over the hard drive writing combinations of all zeros, all ones and random data to remove all traces of any data with hardly any possibility of recovery.

Here are two more:

Autoclave (http://staff.washington.edu/jdlarios/autoclave/) - also has info and links about data security.

BCWipe (http://www.jetico.com/index.htm#/bcwipe.htm) is a utility that can run from Windows to clean up unused space on your hard drive, or you can run it from a floppy to clean a whole drive. It's not free, but it has a free evaluation period.