'Make sure that the computer technician is one understands that deleting a file, formatting a hard drive or reinstalling an operating system doesn't render the data unrecoverable,' Kelley said. If that's the case, and if you want to keep the hard drive with the computer, Kelley recommended taking the machine to a qualified computer technician to perform the work. However, not every attempt to clean off the hard drive is 100 percent successful. 'I have recommended this to many of my friends who aren't tech people and have them use the instructions on .' 'This also uses the write-zero approach, overwriting each block with binary zeroes, and is super easy,' Kinney said. 'Programs such as BCWipe and Eraser can perform this work.'Īn even easier way to do this, provided the user has Windows 7 or better, is to create a system repair disk and then format the hard drive using the standard format command, said Matthew Kinney, executive vice president of research and development with staffing-software maker BWSI in Phoenix. 'The most important thing to consider is that to be certain that you got all of your data, you need to wipe the entire hard drive,' Kelley said. 'With computers, it isn't difficult to wipe data, if you understand what you are doing and do it correctly,' said Greg Kelley, chief technology officer with Vestige Digital Investigations in Medina, Ohio.

How to completely wipe a pc