Hey everyone. I'm Andrea Eldridge from Nerds on Call and Callnerds.com for eHow.com, here today to talk about how to clear a hard drive. With all that we use our computers for these days, from online banking to editing family photos, it's important to make sure your personal data doesn't fall into the wrong hands. The only way to truly keep your data safe from someone who gets a hold of your drive later is to write over it, over and over again until it's unrecognizable. Darik's Boot and Nuke or DBAN is a free program that will wipe your drive completely. Download the program from Dban.org/download. You'll need to burn the file to a CD in a special way that will allow your computer to boot from the CD when you insert it into your drive. Download and install PowerISO, then put a blank CD in your CD rewritable drive. Double-click the PowerISO shortcut on your Desktop. Once the program opens, click open in the top menu bar, navigate to where you downloaded DBAN and select it. Next, click Burn in the top menu. Once this is done, you'll have your bootable disc. Leave the CD in your disc drive and shut down your computer. When you start it back up, you'll see DBAN load. If you just want to keep the average person from recovering the data from your drive, type Auto Nuke and press Enter. this will run through an automated process of writing zeros to every sector of your drive. For 90 percent of the population, this is exactly what you want to do. If you're still concerned that some hacker with mad skills will spend a year painstakingly resurrecting your shards of data, there are more extreme methods included with this software. If that's a concern, I'd recommend you just take a hammer to the drive and save yourself a ton of time. For more information on how to clear a hard drive, check out the links on this page. I'm Andrea Eldridge from Nerds on Call and Callnerds.com for eHow.com. Thanks for watching.
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