Woodburner
I have to laugh at some of your crazy insane ideas to delete the hard drive. Made me chuckle. Thank goodness you lot aren't in I.T.
You could remove the hard drive and buy a twin ribbon cable and install it in your new pc and keep the files safe and you know exactly where they are.
Also, you could look here. And my personal favourite is dban and please be responsible and recycle your old pc. My old pc is a Linux network server and I could use it to host websites etc, but I use it to download and stream to my TV etc.
https://www.lifewire.com/free-data-destruction-software-programs-2626174
You can recover data after using dban, hopefully you don't work in IT
Neil Henry said:My apologies for misunderstaning. I started off learning VB, then C and started writing a load of virii many years ago, but got bored.
You can recover data after using dban, hopefully you don't work in IT.
Got a link that proves that Eddie?
All that I am finding are saying that it cannot once it has finished the first pass, a thorough wiping is going to be impossible to recover. (unless it's an SSD).
I decided after all your great advise to leave it for the eliments to do phase 1.
Phase 2 smash the bugger up.
Phase 3 burn what needs burning....
Nothing flash but it will work
Remove the HDD & physically destroy it, it's very easy to do
This how I go about it.