Hi looking to donate to Youth Center back home. Wish to ask for the best way to check the removal of personal information on the system. Would also really like to leave some things currently installed for them to learn and would be interested in discussion of any complications regarding this.

Thank you in advance for any contributing info

Darik's Boot And Nuke and a re-install of the Operating System.
That's the best way to go.

Format all partitions 7 times from a live disc, delete them afterwards - if you want to give them os and some software without purchasing new windows, install open-source operating system like Ubuntu.

Short of physically destroying the hard drive there's no real absolute way to be sure as far as I am aware. You could write all zeros to the disk dozens of times and still recover things. I used a recovery program on my computer last year after accidentally writing zeros to a hard drive 3 or 4 times (not sure what happened, I'd select the drive and it'd change to my other drive and erase it without warning.) anyhow I managed to pick up a few images and files from a windows installation on the disk back in 2004 along with a dozen or so partitions on the disk since.

How about removing the harddrive? I know it's kind of weird to donate a computer without harddrive, but the harddrive is one of the least expensive parts, so it would still be a decent donation.

What is a good way of physically destroying a hard drive?

Sledgehammer?

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/[device to delete] bs=512 --conv=noerror

Run this command a few times, and there's nothing left of your data.

open it up take out the discs and enjoy their mirrorness I open them up for the magnets anyway since they're nice to play with.

But honestly a good old "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda" will be enough most of the time Disk repairers ignore the sector flags for "damaged" your HDD has spare capacity which is slowly used up over time to replace damaged sectors as they basicly don't exist anymore they are ignored even when you do a format. (BTW a quick format just reflags the entire disk as empty so everything is still there a low level format actually writes to the disk)

the civilized way would be to degauss the HDD. We have one at work and it's quite effective

now, if you have access to a source of thermite, using that could be fun and instructive, that product being able to destroy an artillery gun or a multi-layer armor plating by developping an heat reaction in the range of 2500°C...

At work, we always use a large, heavy duty grinder to cut them into pieces. Disposal under WEEE after that. (obligated under law).

Eat it.

I almost fell off my chair laughing.

Our only concern is identity theft...If they copy some term papers more power to them : D

Wish I had the plans for the Death Star or the Cloak & Dagger cartridge lol