How to completely wipe a hard drive?

[digitalandanalog]

I inherited my mom's computer. It is a Dell with a decent set up of hardware.

Unfortunately my mom and dad really messed it up pretty badly. It has viruses and won't connect to the internet.

I feel it would wise to start over with a freshly cleaned hard drive, but I have no idea what to do so that can happen.

I have the factory CD with the XP OS, so that won't be a problem.

Thanks for any help.

(I would have been more active in the past few months, but my life has changed significantly.)

[Nick1911]

The factory CD will often allow you the option to blow away current partitions.

Otherwise, download something like DBAN.

[AJ Dual]

If you just put in a installable Xp disk, it'll give you the option to reformat the drive right in there.

Choose the option to delete any partitions, then just select the max available size as the new partition, then go on with the installation.

This would not be a secure erasure from the standpoint of spies LEO's/.gov or determined identity thieves, but the prior data would be "gone" from the standpoint of Xp or any viruses. And the latent data that's still on the disk would be free space and get ground up by new files and disk activity as time went on.

To really clean a drive, there are free wiping utilities (edit, DBAN like Nick mentioned) that will write zeros to every sector repeatedly to ensure everything is truly gone and there are no latent signatures of old files on the disk that could be recovered by determined people with the right software, but from the standpoint of just starting fresh and wiping away bad settings and viruses a simple repartition and reformat will do 100% fine.

[Perd Hapley]

Ship to me.  I take care of for you.  Very convenient for you, no?   

[RaspberrySurprise]

The proper amount of thermite will wipe just about any drive clean as a whistle.

[dogmush]

Thermite's what I use.  Hard drive is 100% wiped.

[Harold Tuttle]

F2

[tyme]

You do not need dban simply to reinstall a computer clean.  A plain high-level format (the fast kind) and OS reinstall will get rid of software problems*, viruses, and other malware.

Overwriting the disk (multiple times) is intended to make it impractical to recover any sensitive data on it:  if you're giving up the hdd for repair, giving it to someone else, or tossing it.

Once you've got it reinstalled, secunia psi]http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/]secunia psi should help.

[zahc]

Use dban (or dd) if you are worried about hiding sensitive data from those who might try to recover it from the HDD. A simple reinstall is all that is needed to nuke all the software that is installed.