If you have to send a hard drive somewhere for repair or dispose of it and you can still access it is sometimes needed to quickly clear off the data on the drive. One way to do this is format a drive and writing zeroes to it. In Vista or Windows 7 this is now quite simple. First,make sure the drive is mounted with a drive letter say e: in Disk Management and then in a elevated command prompt ie. Run As administrator, type the following:
format e: /fs:NTFS /p:2
This command will write 2 passes of zeroes to the drive and then format it as NTFS. It will take quite a while on a terabyte or larger drive. While not perfect, for most uses this should be enough to deter snoops as most software recovery programs will find it hard to recover anything from a drive treated this way.
If you are really worried about data security then use DBAN from its boot disk to wipe the drive fully and securely. Or just bash the drive with a hammer or some such before disposal.
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