My aunt has passed custody of her old XP pc to me for disposal. It contains a lot of personal taxation and other financial information about her (though not her bank/card details). She would like me to wipe the HDD securely before dumping it. Well, I know I could simply take the HDD out and trash it with a sledge hammer but it can probably be reused so I’d rather not just consign it to the dump because it is simply out of date.

There are loads of supposedly good “secure wipe” type freeware progs out there but which is the best or can I just pick any one and go for it?

DBAN , industrial strength and open source.

dban boot & nuke

Dban thirded

Hope DBAN does it as it’s what I use. I’m no expert but I can imagine how three passes of 1s and 0s all over the disk is recoverable.

thanks gents!

erm… that’s “gents” in a non sexist and totally all inclusive, generic way…… gulp!

Racist! 😉

I think CCleaner does up to 7 passes. Not qualifed to say if this is more secure or not though.

DBAN. Next question?

The ‘hammer’ method isn’t as secure as you might think. DBAN is military-grade stuff.