Securely Erasing Disk Drives
I've recently had to securely wipe a number of drives and I suspect that more and more people are interested in doing this. With concern about privacy and identity theft many of us don't want to let go of a drive without making sure data is completely erased. For PCs I like Boot and Nuke and for Macs I use the Mac OS Disk Utility. Both tools use multiple writes to virtually eliminate the chance of recovering data using forensic tools.
Boot and Nuke erases Windows file systems (FAT, VFAT, and NTFS) and Linux file systems (ReiserFS, EXT, and UFS) and it's easy to use. You can get versions for floppy disks, CDs and USB.
If your a Mac user, all you need is your OS disks. Just boot from the installation disk, go to the Tools menu and run the Disk Utility. A step by step list of instructions is available at http://www.howtowipeyourdrive.com/Macintosh.aspx. Disk Utility has an option to overwrite the drive 1, 7 or 35 times. (OK, I'm not above a good fit of paranoia, but 35 times is extreme). I use the 7x option but if I were short on time I'd use the 1x and only slightly worry about it.
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