This business of data recovery from an erased disk is actually much harder than the stories would lead you to believe. As a general rule, overwriting the disk will do the job unless somebody is willing to invest a few thousand quid in an intensive recovery operation. Law enforcement organisations may be willing to do that for an important prosecution, but if all you're concerned about is making sure people can't read your credit card number or other personal information from an old file, then just wipe the disk.
All the paranoia might be appropriate if you're, say, a law firm that has to be able to legally testify that you protected client information. For normal people, a re-format is probably all you need.
If you want to be certain, getting DBAN on there from a multi-floppy zip, as suggested by d000hg, sounds like a simple approach, given the lack of interfaces on said machine. (Alternatively, you could easily write a program to zero everything out, if you're into systems-level programming - use the BIOS routines for low-level disk sector access.)
Criminals have better and/or easier ways of getting that kind of information than using forensic-lab-scale techniques on the disk of a laptop bought from eBay or a car boot sale. In the same way that they'll break into the house without a burglar alarm, rather than learn how to disable the alarm on the house next door, so they will get stuff from the disk that has been sold as-is, rather than using a file recovery utility on the disk that was formatted.
People need to gain some sense of perspective about this stuff
All the paranoia might be appropriate if you're, say, a law firm that has to be able to legally testify that you protected client information. For normal people, a re-format is probably all you need.
If you want to be certain, getting DBAN on there from a multi-floppy zip, as suggested by d000hg, sounds like a simple approach, given the lack of interfaces on said machine. (Alternatively, you could easily write a program to zero everything out, if you're into systems-level programming - use the BIOS routines for low-level disk sector access.)
Criminals have better and/or easier ways of getting that kind of information than using forensic-lab-scale techniques on the disk of a laptop bought from eBay or a car boot sale. In the same way that they'll break into the house without a burglar alarm, rather than learn how to disable the alarm on the house next door, so they will get stuff from the disk that has been sold as-is, rather than using a file recovery utility on the disk that was formatted.
People need to gain some sense of perspective about this stuff
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