Just ran into a situation where I need to secure erase hard drives in a few older computers. I have Active Boot Disk and ERD Commander (the new Microsoft version) utilities with this feature, but the computer in question had only 128 MB RAM which was too small for the RAM disk these utilities need to create so I could not boot from them. Then I remembered some of the drive manufacturers utilities to check drives usually have this feature. One of the computers had a Maxtor drive (which was bought by Seagate) so I was able to use Seagate’s utility CD for this one; another had a Western Digital drive so I used WD’s utility CD. Check drive manufacturer’s websites for these great free utility CDs that you can download, make, and boot with to test hard drives and wipe them clean. Also, I always use the basic DOS versions of these utilities because they are smaller and easier to use and get the job done.