Completely removing EVERYTHING from an old Hard Drive?

So my uncle let me take apart his really old desktop, and I removed his 2.5" 160GB Hard Drive. I'm going to buy an enclosure for it soon. However, it still has Windows XP installed on it, as well as loads of other things I really don't want on my computer.

How can I completely remove everything from the hard drive so I can use it as an external storage? Should I just drag and drop everything to the recycle bin?

Format the disk :)

Lomai said:

Format the disk :)

Could you please explain how to do that?

How is DBAN overkill, me use it all the time (sometimes I format peoples unused HDD's as a prank HA). Anyway there are quiet a few tools on something called Hirencd, otherwise buy the enclosure, connect it to computer and format from there.

Kirsch said:

smarteyeball said:

If you really want to Completely remove EVERYTHING from an old Hard Drive, use DBAN.

Based on his post, he wont need to use DBAN. He just wants to use it as external storage, a quick format would suffice.

Unless his uncle was an FBI agent and he plans on throwing it away, DBAN is a little overkill :)

I agree. And if he's going to throw it away the best method is Mr Sledgehammer.