Ok I have the hammer, how do I find the hard drive

NO NO NO NO! Put the damn hammer away!!!!

http://www.dban.org/

I would love to get my hands on old computers to refurbish and pass on to schools etc. I would probably cry if someone gave me one and told me they'd trashed the HDD when it is possible and really not that hard to put the existing data beyond the reach of anyone but GCHQ/CIA/Mossad etc.

yep

put the hammer away and just keep it until you need to reduce stress levels

hitting things does reduce stress

ishould know i hammered my way into my kitchen the other day when the door stuck yet again

oh and broke the frame

I have to agree that formatting alone is pretty much useless. In fact I've heard that to recover data from a faulty drive, sometimes the first thing you do is format the disk, then let the data recovery software do it's stuff.

I'm positive that if you dban'd a disk it would be wiped beyond the capabilities of any widely available tools. Basically what it does is writes 1s and 0s all over the disk repeated times. Anything that was there is truly over written. Much more sophisticated than physical destruction which should only be required to protect state secrets IMHO, and you have a disk you can use again!

So put away any devolutionary thoughts of 'Ug, shiny thing, must smash!'

Anne.... you know there is only one way .......Smash it !!

Or find a really big magnet......

I refer to my previous comment about not giving in to your inner chimpanzee.

Well hello you Long time no see, how are you?

Fine thanks - have sent you a PM rather than bore everyone