How to Safely Erase a Hard Disk

How to completely destroy and erase all data on a hard disk so it can be sold on or disposed of without fear of others seeing what was previously on it.  You would want to be sure that all of the data on your hard disk is completely destroyed before you sold it on ebay, or gave it to someone or disposed of it.  Most people simply assume that formatting the hard disk will be enough to ensure there data cannot be recovered by anyone else.  Other slightly more techy savy people, also delete the partition(s) on the hard disk and assume that is enough to destroy all their data.  Even this is not enough and your data can still be recovered to a certain extent.  To fully wipe data from a hard disk, you need to securely delete it.  To do this, you need a piece of software that will perform 'low level formatting', secure deletion and destruction of data on a physical level.  One such piece of software that does this is Kill Disk.  I am not an affiliate or employee of Kill Disk and do not care if you buy their software, as you may find other equally good tools like this on the web.  This guide is just to let people know what to do to securely erase their hard disk and Kill Disk is one such way of doing this.

Kill Disk supports 17 security standards, most importantly, including DoD 5220.22 M, which means it supports the US Department of Defense Industry standard, which is pretty secure and safe! Simply follow the instructions in the User Guide and you can be sure that all your data is destroyed for good.