Permanently deleting data

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My friend has asked me to permanently delete data on his laptop hard drive. He is selling the laptop.By permanently I mean that nobody can recover the data. I am using for this Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) .However this is very slow process but accordingly to instruction very secure.
How do you deal with deleting data from hard drive permanently?

 

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Yeah, hard one to completely remove, I would replace the hard drive to be safe
Then smash it up then you know its gone. Even laptop harddrives are cheap now.

 

Unless you are talking about individual bits of data, a single one-pass wipe makes it almost impossible for anyone except law enforcement (with access to humungously powerful and complex machinery) to retrieve anything even remotely useful from a drive. Take that as fact - from someone who has actually worked for a UK law enforcement agency for two years as a security admin. Anybody who tells you anything otherwise is talking scaremongering bull****.

 

Nothing exotic required... I simply run the disk through cipher /w.

 

The so-called NATO format usually requries at least 8 wipes/deletion of partition to ensure data is irretrievable but for ease of use I always go for either of these two :

http://www.blancco.com/en/products+services/?gclid=CMiU5YrKuJkCFQ48Qwod53JK7A

http://www.eurosoft-uk.com/zerodata.htm

 

I repeat - wipe it once with killdisk and you will never need to worry. '7 pass DOD method' and '35 pass Guttman' are all absolute bollocks - just because you can retrieve an individual bit from a drive doesn't mean that will provide any useful information.

 

Thank you for you help. I will give a try to the killdisk.I have just downloaded it.
I have learned as well what is cipher /w command. I did not know about this.

 

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