Completely Erasing a Hard Drive

One important procedure to undertake before disposing of a PC is to ensure that its hard drive is either completely cleaned of Lehigh data, or completely disabled. For many types of drives, like laptop drives, which contain glass plattens, a hammer can shatter the plattens, and fully disable the drive. Another method, which leaves the drive usable but blank, is to run a 'Kill Disk' program from alternate media. LTS provides prepared CD for this purpose at the EWFM Circulation Desk, for more information, see Considerations for Disposal of University-owned Computers . This software formats the hard drive and makes multiple passes, writing zeros to each of the sectors on it.