How would one completely format a hardrive so there would be no possible way to recover files from it, but still be useable? Is there a way?

The drive manufacturers all have utilities that will write 0s to the entire drive. That will pretty much make anything unrecoverable. You should be able to DL one of these from your drive maker.

If you try hard enough you can almost always get Data back from a Hard Drive (like the police)

If you really don't want anyone to find your data you could take the disk apart and break it. Some comapnies also have machines that produce a huge magnetic field with electro magnets that destroys the surface of the disk for ever (but this also destroys the servos in the drive)

Otherwise a reformat once or twice should do the trick for most people

Zee.

AMD Athlon 2800+ barton @ 12.5 X 176 : 2200mhz
512Mb Corsair RAM
MSI KT6 Delta mobo
Leadtek AGP 6600 gt 128Mb
120Gb Seagate HDD

I've seen them do some stuff on TechTV to make an HDD unrecoverable. They even put one in a microwave. I don't think that's what you'd want to do though.

A good computer takes good care of their computer

thanks for the quick emails guys. The reason I want to do this is because I plan on selling some drives on ebay and I want to make sure that whoever buys them cants recover... but it seems hard. I am using a program called eraser right now that is suppose to erase the drive to a certain extent that any recover will be harder than just using your basic data recovery tool. These drives were surplus from my office at work; i dont want any business files to get out there...im rethinking even selling them now after seeing what these data recovery software programs can find!

Even professional recovery and government agencies do not get much (if any) useable data from low level formatted hard drives. What they do get is fractional at best. The data they find most useful is on computers that they confiscate BEFORE they are wiped out.

Looks good on TV but does not happen in reality.

Jimi_l

eraser didnt do much to it; I got the diagnostic tools from western digital and did a low level format writing 0's to the drive and the recovery software has not found much of anything at all. thanks for the responses everyone; you learn something new everyday!

you can try program below, I have never used it. http://www.pcinspector.de/emaxx/uk/faq.htm

it runs from a floppy.

The military has software tools that can recover data from a hardware even after it has been zeroed out 7+ times in a row. There may or may not be commercial versions out there, but why take the risk.

Don't sell the hard drives if you don't want the data out there...

Someone may still be able to recover it...

OOPS meant to write "hard drive" in second line above...