Wipe/clear old hard drives

[neviditelny]

I got a couple of pretty old laptops that I'm going to get rid off but before I do that I want to wipe the hard drives to make sure there is nothing left on them.
What is the best way to do that?

 

[kindai]

Windows 7 or higher from elevated command prompt.

format c: /fs:NTFS /p:2

Replace C: as whatever the letter gets assigned as.

 

[brendy]

Hammer, nail and a bucket of salty water.

 

[neviditelny]

Should have mentioned that both laptops are running XP (Shows how old they are)

 

[PiKe]

Use Dban.

 

[EsaT]

Find earth construction site and ask if you can put those laptops in excavator's path on rocky ground.
That should make all data in now softened drives permanently destroyed.

Or if those laptops still boot use tactical DBAN "warhead".

 

[Deleted member 138126]

If you want to keep Windows XP, then make sure you've deleted all your files, then run sdelete which will zero out all unused disk space, making your files unrecoverable.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/sdelete.aspx