How To: Wipe your hard drive completely clean

Systm is the Do It Yourself show designed for the common geek who wants to quickly and easily learn how to dive into the latest and hottest tech projects. We will help you avoid pitfalls and get your project up and running fast. Search Systm on WonderHowTo for more DIY episodes from this Revision3 show.

Selling your old computer? Donating it to charity? Learn how to permanently wipe your hard drives, with and without a blow torch!

From Revision3:
Selling your old computer?

Donating it to charity?

Worried about somebody finding your naughty photos or financial info?

Worried about getting sued 'cause your small business didn't take 'reasonable measures' to dispose of sensitive data?

Then you'll love this episode of Systm, where we get serious about wiping hard drives.

Or, to use more technical lingo, "purging or sanitizing your hard drive.

In part one, Roger Chang (in for David Calkins) walks you thru our favorite tools for wiping drives: Darik's Boot 'n Nuke...

Boot 'n Nuke covers the drive sanitization needs for 99% of you out there.

Part two is for the folks out there that absolutely, positively want to make sure nobody can get the data back off that drive, you need to think physical destruction of the drive... or at least the platters inside that drive.

Tons of commercial drive disposal companies will shred or degauss that drive for you and give you a certificate... it's the easiest thing to to, especially if you have a lot of drives to dispose of.

Want something a little more DIY? The watchwords are disintegrate, incinerate, pulverize, shred, or melt.

Thermite is fun, but the thick black smoke (not to mention the ridiculously high temps of burning Thermite) can easily lead to a visit from the fire deparment...

... we suggest your grab the proper sized precision Torx driver and remove the platters.

Then do what we did: grind off the surface, or melt the disks!