wiping hard drive

[marieandgordon]

probably not the right place to ask, but we have an old computer with lots of rubbish on it, before we get rid how do we wipe the hard drive before reinstalling windows, ta. marie

[xistenz]

Download Killdisk and make a bootable floppy with KillDisk on it. Then boot from this disk and run the program. It will overwrite everything on the hard drive with zeros, thus 'killing' the disk. You can then format the hard drive and re-install windows

[TedNelly]

Another program you could try BCWipe fully integrated into the Windows Shell and efficiently

shreds file data so that recovery by any means is impossible

http://www.jetico.com/bcwipe3.htm

[marieandgordon]

thanks i'll try that, but can someone tell me how to physically format the hard drive what do i have to type in?

[TedNelly]

Just use your old friend "google" How to reformat a harddisk drive

http://www.cyberwalker.net/faqs/how-tos/reinstall-faq.html

[DavidR]

A lot depends on what OS you are going to install?

Win98 uses fat32 format and XP uses NTFS (or fat32) format. If XP the OS CD can format the drive as part of the installation.

[Lisandro]

probably not the right place to ask, but we have an old computer with lots of rubbish on it, before we get rid how do we wipe the hard drive before reinstalling windows, ta. marie

If you will reinstall windows in the same HDD and use it, why do you need to weap it? Just format will be ok 
Anyway, Eraser is another program that allows to make a boot disk and weap the HDD.
http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/eraser/Eraser57Setup.zip