good morning, today I am looking at ways to really wipe data from an old laptop before donating to a school. So far I have learned that it is ridiculously easy for a computer savvy thief to retrieve data that has been "deleted" or even from a drive that has been re-formatted. Given enough time, money and brains (ok, I know you are thinking "most criminals are actually short on all three", but I'm not, so I am doing this research just in case) data can be recovered after almost ANY form of removal. However, there are some very, very good FREE programs available on the web to do a pretty thorough job of overwriting your hard drive with random 1's and 0's so as to foil the average bad guy. I will update on what I actually manage to do to my poor old hard drive.
As a side note, the only foolproof way to secure destroy your old hard drive is to melt it down to slag metal, truly : ). Another extreme alternative is skeet shooting, which I admit sounds like real fun, but unfortunately does not do much for getting a laptop to DH's school for cute presentations about bats on the LCD projector.