Erase your hard drive

From day to day there are articles in the news about people who got a used computer with sensible data on it. Even if the hard drive was formated it's quite easy for skilled people to take a look at the data which was stored on this drive. To safely erase the data it make sense to overwrite the disc with new data which make it more or less impossible to access the original data. An easy way to do this is under Linux the command mkfs.ext3:

mkfs.ext3 -cc /dev/drive

Replace drive with your harddisk (i.e. /dev/sda1) and the partition is erased.