Easiest way to securely wipe laptop drive

I have a friend who's not very pc savvy and she needs to wipe her hard drive in an old laptop before she gives it away. Can anyone recommend an easy way she can do this? Something like plug in this USB stick and execute the program on it.

It's Win7 on her machine.

PS: Usually with old hard drives I use an axe

Hi there

Use any direct write program that simply does a direct address physical write to a HDD -- sector by sector several times --simply write hex '00' several times over every single cluster --don't use any OS type file system as these usually don't erase old data but just overwrite it -- that's how CIA etc often can recover data from HDD's since even with a normal OS erase only alters the directory (marking specific clusters / area as free) rather than deleting the the actual physical data from the HDD.

Cheers
jimbo

The Diskpart “clean all” command will erase the drive's contents securely. It will write over every sector on the disk and zero out completely to delete data on the disk. And the deleted data cannot be recovered via usual tools.

Same goes with full format it will erase the drive's contents securely.

Please boot your computer with Windows Setup Media and from Windows Recovery Environment start the Command Prompt.

Execute following commands to erase Disk 0.

Code:

Diskpart

List Disk

Select Disk 0

Clean all

How to Use Cipher Command to Overwrite Deleted Data in Windows

Thanks for the replies. I think some of them will be too complicated for her but the DBAN cd, well she might just be able to make that work.