hehe its me again.....

i bought a western digital HD like 2 months ago and its already going bad..every time i start my computer the hard drive makes a horrible noise for 10 seconds or so... and then it stops...anyways im going to the store and changin it for another one.they told me it has a year warranty so they i can change it for another one..

my question is. i know the ppl from the store are gonna keep the hard drive..should i delete everything on it? before returning it?
if so how? windows also? i know i can uninstall everything but how do unistal windows

 

well, if the drive is dead, there's no way they're going to get anything out of it without spending lots of money on data recovery. But if you want to be safe, you can find a large electromagnet and pass the drive over it. that should wipe out the data clean. one of those tape eraser things might work too.

 

wwaht is an electromagnet and where do i find it

 

Actually, no magnets you're likely to have around the house will trash a hard drive; they're fairly well shielded magnetically. If you're friends with a hospital technician, an MRI scanner will wipe them.

If the data is not accessable at all, there's not much you can do to wipe it, but if it's not accessable, it won't be easily read by WD either. If you can access the drive from a boot floppy, meaning you CAN read it somewhat, you might stick it into another computer as a slave and run something like Eraser on it to formally wipe the data beyond NORMAL retrieval. You can grab that here: http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4221.html