I recently needed to format my laptop’s hard disk prior to donating it to electronics heaven. In doing some research and finding some crappy tools that don’t do a good enough job anyway, I decided to use Ubuntu to boot up using it’s LiveCD feature without installing anything on my hard disk. I then opened up a terminal and use df -h to identify my windows NTFS partition. I then used the built in “shred” utility to format that partition. It uses a default of 26 passes and overwrites with zeros to make it “harder” for sophisticated systems to glean any data from it. I used the link below as a reference:
http://maketecheasier.com/ubuntu-how-to-delete-your-files-or-wipe-your-hard-drive-beyond-recovery/2008/02/14
Hope this helps someone else – K
