What's a good program to overrite my HD

[1Chris]

I'm looking for a program to overwrite my HD to erase the data. I see a lot of them are deceiving. They say stuff like, "Writes zeros to hard drive." Or, "deletes files from HD."
When you do that it just removes the reference of the file from the file system table. The file remains on the disk until another file is created over it. So many of the programs don't write over it. I want one that writes over several times.
In the computer industry, is there a popular program that is known as the best one? Is there a good one that's free? I will pay for one but thought I'd ask since some of the free software in the past has been the best in it's class. Thank you,
Chris.

[Direct1]

Active@ Kill Disk - Hard Drive Eraser is free and works great.

http://www.killdisk.com/

Good luck! :D

[1Chris]

Thank you for replying. I think the free version doesn't get rid of the data. The add says; "....it overwrites all addressable locations on the drive with zeros (FREE version). Active@ KillDisk Professional version suggests several methods for data destruction. For example, in US DoD 5220.22-M method it overwrites all addressable storage and indexing locations on the drive three times: with zeros (0x00), complement (0xFF) and random characters."

I think the 0xFF and "random characters" is what will make it so the data is unreadable.
The pro looks like it will do what I want. Thanks for replying. Chris.

[Strawbs]

there are a few you might try here (http://www.webattack.com/freeware/security/fwerase.html).

[Sterling_Aug]

I vote for:

Dariks' Boot and Nuke. I use the DoD 3 pass wipe at work.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

[Midknyte]

I vote for:

Dariks' Boot and Nuke. I use the DoD 3 pass wipe at work.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

DBAN is da bomb. you can get it as part of UBCD.
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/