Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

I have been asked for advice by a local school concerning the best way to remove (completely) all data on the hard drives of the school's old computers that they would like donate/recycle for someone else to use.

My advice to them will be to just remove throw away the hard drives, since it is impossible to completely erase data 100% reliably and new, faster, bigger, hard drives are pretty cheap and easy to install.

Perhaps someone else would care to comment on this approach?

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Removing the drives is a sound approach, but what do you mean by 'throw away'? If you mean you'll physically destroy them, that's one thing. But if you're just tossing them in the garbage, you're not much better off than if you'd given them away.

http://www.dban.org/ is worth a look: easy to use and, apparently, good enough for government work.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7816446.stm

However they could use it as a learning experience and save innocuous stuff over anything sensitive.