After cleaning out the garage, I came across an old box that had been sitting in the corner for many years. The bottle recycling depots in my area now take old computer parts (Canada put in a small environmental tax on new electronics, so now the recycling places take old stuff for free!), so it's pretty convenient to get rid of this stuff now.
However, I knew the hard drive likely contained old checked-out code that had been moved to a new machine. I'm not a super-paranoid guy, but there's enough horror stories out there that I'd rather wipe an old drive if I have the chance. So I popped the drive out and hooked it up to my Windows XP box.
I wasn't really surprised when I booted XP and couldn't see any sign of the drive. I cruised over to Device Manager, and it showed up there, but you can't format or mount drives from Device Manager. I was a bit vexed, moreso because I wasn't sure what kind of file-system was on the drive. Was it a linux ext2/ext3, or a FreeBSD UFS system?
I came across a nice post that pointed me in the direction of a great tool called Ext2 Installable File System for Windows. It installs a Control Panel that lets you mount and access ext2/ext3 drives. I gave it a shot, and it even picked up my drive and allowed me to assign it a letter during the install, so by the time I was done, Z: was waiting for me!
It turns out that the drive was UFS however, so when I tried to access it, I got a "This drive has not been formatted" message. That was enough for me though, as I could now quick-format it with NTFS, then access it with my erasing utility, eraserd.
A couple of quick commands into a DOS prompt later:
eraserd -allfiles Z: -passes 3
eraserd -disk Z: -passes 1
and this hard drive was all set for it's trip to recycling, and I was assured that nothing wayward will happen to any old data that might be on it. The first command removed any known files on the disk (which was none, since I had just formatted it), and the second command then used a secure erasing algorithm to overwrite all free space on the disk.
Because I wasn't using the XP machine for anything else at the moment, I re-formatted the disk and re-wiped the free space two more times. Maybe I am super-paranoid.
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I find that a hammer, 4 inch steel nail and a block of wood are speedier for old drives, and just as effective… not to mention way more satisfying…
I've used timber spikes, an axe, a splitting maul, and my .30-30 Winchester to do this job. You can retire about 3~4 at a time with a rifle, and a 3.5" drive is a good sized challenging target at 100 yards or more.
Also you can use the MMC (Microsoft Management Console) to view drives with non-Windows partitions. Easiest way is right-click My Computer and pick Manage. You can delete partitions and reformat from there. But the Winchester is far more fun
I had exactly the same situation – had a pile of old hd drives that I could not dispose because they were full of stuff and did not have time to delete it.
Now, applying the method mentioned by Max is slightly difficult, you need tools, you make noise
etc, therefore I downloaded a free tool called killdisk – they also offer you an iso of a bootable cd that can be used.
I successfully deleted all the data. The only cons: the process is time consuming, couple of hours a hard drive.