Insurance and a Laptop - data on the hard drive

[Spanky Deluxe]

Ok, a couple of hours ago I dropped my Dell laptop. I've had a quick look at it and its seriously broken. I can't get it to turn on, the screen's come off, bla bla bla. As much as I love Macs I really love this thing, its been with me for nearly three years and up until recently would still have been considered to be a fast laptop.

I'm going to call my insurance company tomorrow morning to see what they can do with it. Now the thing is I don't really want them to put it on eBay without wiping the hard drive. I've heard that that's what they often do with laptops that they can't repair and its a major source of identity theft. The hard drive just slides out the side by removing one screw. The fall made the screw fall out anyway so the hard drive will probably come out easily. I have a USB adapter for connecting hard drives so I can probably get all my data off.

Can anyone recommend a hardcore formatting program for OS X with which I could completely wipe the drive? I mean the kind of thing that rewrites data so no recovery program can get it back? Do you think it would be ok to do this, insurance wise? I'm pretty sure it would be because its in bits already and the hard drive will slide right out.

Any thoughts?

 

[WildCowboy]

If you have the proper enclosure for it, you can just use Disk Utility on your Mac to erase it with options for the number of passes it will do. Be warned that the 35-pass setting (complete overkill unless you want to delete nuclear launch codes) can take several days to run.