Formatting and selling hard drives. Help?

[DerekMecca]

I want to format three different hard drives and sell them with my desktop PC tomorrow at noon. I need to make sure that the data cannot be restored... as some of it is private. I have heard there are programs that can format a drive and scramble the left over data so that it cannot be restored.... suggestions? Or maybe there is a way to simply do this in Windows 7 without downloading a program? I need to figure this out ASAP and this is the only place I could think of that might be able to help. Thanks!

 

[rive22]

Darik's Boot And Nuke is what I always use.

 

[vraa]

http://www.dban.org/

 

[DerekMecca]

Looks good, I'll try this in the morning unless a better option pops up.

 

[rive22]

You'll want to let it run overnight because it takes a while.

 

[sabregen]

yup, DBAN, use the command "autonuke" easy-peasy

 

[m4rkNZ]

As above use DBAN. But do it as soon as possible if you plan to get rid of them by noon tomorrow.

Depending on how big the hard drives are it could take a while. I just recently done some 250GB HDD's which took around 3 hours for all of them. Also make sure only HDD's you're selling are plugged in as it will format all drives.