How do I completely wipe my Hard Drive?

Spinrite 6.0 is an awesome program but at $89.00 it may not be financially feasible for someone who may only want to wipe data completely from a HDD once to sell to someone else. In that case, DBAN is free and works well, just doing the one thing the initial poster seems to want to do.

Well if you really want to follow government guidelines then you will need to degauss your hard drive as well.

Isn't when you low level format a drive it isn't just quire hard its quite impossible because its as if there were nothing ever on the drive it goes into every sector and deletes everything. Not saying your wrong or anything just my thought on the matter.

I'm not 100% sure, but when my hdd refused to boot installed linux or windows even after using normal wiping methods then re-installing I used that tool by connecting the drive to another PC and it fixed the problem. Normal wiping methods just hide the data and it's only deleted when you write new data to the disk. The tool takes ages though because it writes zeros and 1's (i.e new data) to the disk.

I would suggest Darik's boot and nuke format. But what you have to take in as well the hidden back up of the master boot record that also needs to be wipes as well. which helps in restoring the master boot record on the hard drive as well. A simple boot and nuke should be fine. Unless your will to wait to fill it with all 1's and 0's to make sure nothing is recoverable in it. I remember doing low level formats even with DOS 3.3 way back when MFM, RLL were the main hard drives at that time.

not in any i have seen.

There used to be a long time ago from 80296 processors up until the 80486 SX and DX Microcomputers. You could literally wipe the drive clean. But it has been removed from the BIOS itself from the Pentium on up. I have not seen it since then. I still have a Cyrix486 40DLC machine at home over here. with IDE connections on it. But there are no Sata connection and all ISA slots within the machine itself.

A wiped and formatted drive, yes. A drive with the data securely unrecoverable by the new owner, probably not. I'd use DBAN with 1, 7 or 35 passes (let it run overnight) to make sure sensitive information is obliterated, just for the peace of mind.

I'm 100% positive that a CEO of Intel does not need to sell his laptop to be able to aforde a new one. Esecially if they are going to use intel parts which they would be able to get for a big discount (if not for free).