Best Clean secure Hard Drive Wipe before clean OS reinstall

[VIBM]

I've been away for awhile, but took my 770E out of it's laptop
bag for, probably, more than a year.

Anyway, I figured I would like to do as good a military wipe,
as possible, before I reinstalled Windows.
That way, should I decide to one day sell the computer
or hard drive, I would feel more secure about any personal information not getting recovered.
I would like to try it with freeware, so is DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) the best way to go for this? And if so, which version would be the best for my 770E?

Also, I haven't decided yet, whether to install Win2000 or Win98SE. With only 64MB of ram, would WinXP-Pro be worth installing?

Thanks for any guidance.

[rkawakami]

DBAN will certainly get rid of any data that you have on the drive if you are really worried about somebody doing a forensics job on your system. I would assume that the latest version of DBAN should be able to do the job. There's also other alternatives out there; just Google "secure disk wipe freeware" and you should find some.

Given only 64MB of RAM, I'd have to say that Windows XP is out. W2K should be the better choice over W98, from the standpoint of supported hardware and/or drivers.

[VIBM]

Ray.
I was leaning towards Win2000, and now you've convinced me.
I will also check out DBAN alternatives, like you suggested.
Thank you very much.

[RRHODY]

Curious - Hitachi Drive Fitness Test has a utility that supposedly does a low level format (but only on Hitachi disks). Would this low level format wipe the data from the drive as well as DBAN or others?

[emeraldgirl08]

Have not tried DBAN yet but use Killdisk for my zeroing needs.

[Neil]

A few months ago I installed W2K on a 770 (not "E") with 233MHz CPU and 128MB RAM. It was dog slow. I decided I could not live with it and went with W98SE, now the system is quite snappy and useful. It may have been the old HDD that was slowing W2K down, but I could not believe the difference in speed between 2K and 98SE. But, of course, YMMV.

[VIBM]

A few months ago I installed W2K on a 770 (not "E") with 233MHz CPU and 128MB RAM. It was dog slow. I decided I could not live with it and went with W98SE, now the system is quite snappy and useful. It may have been the old HDD that was slowing W2K down, but I could not believe the difference in speed between 2K and 98SE. But, of course, YMMV.

Neil. My 770E is a 267Mhz PII, but with only 64MB RAM.
So, it sounds like Win2K might run even slower on mine, than it did on your laptop.

RRHODY. I can't tell if it's a Hitachi hard drive or not.
The Belarc profile lists the hard drive as "IBM-DJSA-220".
Do you know if there is also a low level format wipe for my drive?

Well, I think I will erase the drive, and then either install 98SE or 2K.
Is there anything I should save from my present win98SE
setup(drivers, etc.), that I will need if I reinstall win98SE
or Win2K?
Thanks again.