Reformating Hardrive?

So I heard it's a good I dea to do at least once a year,and I havn't done it with my new pc yet and wanted to do a clean install of win xp.I have an oem copy of win xp, so if I totally wipe eveything out I mean totally so one of these recovery programs such as "Get data back" that you have here won't be able to recover anything, will I still be able to use the xp recovery console to reinstall win xp from the recovery partition?If so can you suggest a good freeware utility that I can download, preferebly bootable from a cd-rom or just something that will totally erase everything so it can't be recovered?


Thx for your time,
Grimm

 

DBAN:

http://majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4596

I use this quite frequently to secure wipe hard drives. Pending on the level you set, and the size of the drive, this may/will take a LONG time to complete.