I am wondering if anyone can tell me the most quick, easiest and most reliable software available (preferably free) in order for me to completely delete all data from my hard drive.

I intend giving it away for others to use and I have a lot of sensitive data on it which I wish to ensure does not get recovered. I realise a simple format will not suffice.

I have been informed that Microsoft provide a free program for this called 'SDelete' but I can find nothing about it or a download link on the Microsoft site.

I am using W7 Ultimate and IE8

Any advice or help will be greatly appreciated.

Poseidon

Here is a site I trust with peer-reviewed freeware: Best Free Secure Erase Utility (http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-secure-erase-utility.htm)

Personally I have used DBAN in the past.

I have used a free, open-source application called Eraser to do this type of thing. It has many options from a quick wipe of a drive to DOD spec multi-pass overwrite of the drive with random data. You can download it from Sourceforge.net here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/

Thank you both for your answers.

I will look into these applications.

Poseidon