Companies and individuals frequently sell on old pieces of kit, or consign them to the dump. One thing that is often forgotten is cleaning the hard drives of data. Whilst the most secure method (and possibly most satisfying) is a few well placed clouts from a club hammer, this does little for the re-sale value of the machine.
How can you ensure your data is wiped?
At the very least do a low level format of the disk (fdisk), then re-format and install the operating system. This will remove the data from your drive, although a determined forensic study can still retrieve the data from residual magnetism within the drive.
A better solution is to use a package that over-writes the disk several times with random data (such as http://dban.sourceforge.net/), follow this up with an fdisk and re-install and you should be OK.
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