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How do I securely delete my entire hard drive with no possibility of recovery?

I am donating my old computers, and I want to erase EVERY TRACE of personal information, and all data, from my computers, with no possibility of recovery by those data recovery programs. I have been trying to find a good program to do this, but it seems like they all cost lots of money or aren't good enough.

Public Comments

1. there used to be some software on the net called killdisk, you burn it to a floppy or a cd, it will zero out your drive 35 times.
2. Ok well if you have a compaq or whichever kind of type of computer you should look up into system restore but then go into advance then it should lead you into format the whole drive. But you yourself will have to delete the D: files that you have on there. I know that the format won't count for D: because I myself have done it.
3. Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=61951&package_id=58479&release_id=439240 Sure Delete http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,22393-order,1-page,1-c,alldownloads/description.html http://www.webmasterfree.com/suredelete.html WipeDrive by White Canyon http://www.whitecanyon.com/
4. You could also get an electro magnet. They used to use them in radio stations to erase tapes used for commercials. It's not expensive. You'll need to access the hard drive, and turn on the electromagnet and move it around your hard drive. Make sure you keep your credit cards, vcr tapes and other things away. Try that. Best of luck to you.
5. Check out the drive manufactuers website for utilities. Usually there are installation & diagnostic utilites available. What you are looking for is what used to be called a Low-Level Format program. Due to changes in modern drives these are now Zero Fill utilities. These programs will write zero's (0) on every sector of the drive the entire drive will be erased leaving nothing but zeros. You can run this utility as many times as you like.
6. Try cnet.com. This question comes up a lot. Also, check out free programs available at softpedia.com. Check with a local computer repair shop and see what they suggest. They're experts on this and should know if it is even possible.