how to totally erase my hard drive

[cellsius]

Best bet is to boot the pc from cd rom with an xp cd in
it, it will ask you if you want to format the entire hard
drive , say yes and it will put a fresh install of xp on
there with none of your files, if not boot into dos and
format

 

[Bob Willard]

Best bet is to boot the pc from cd rom with an xp cd in
it, it will ask you if you want to format the entire hard
drive , say yes and it will put a fresh install of xp on
there with none of your files, if not boot into dos and
format

Uh, formatting a HD does not overwrite the data files; it only
overwrites the pointers to those files, leaving the data intact
and readable by skilled folks (or by semi-skilled folks using
available tools).

If you want to make your data unreadable, get something that will
write to the entire HD. Every HD vendor has a vendor-specific tool
that will write zeroes to the entire HD. For even more security,
you can use Eraser or a similar tool to overwrite everything with
random junk.