confidential info on old harddrives.

<I'm sure that lawyers are the worst because they know that if you did <anything with the information or even made it public knowledge that you ha <the information they would successfully sue you for everything you own. It's a foolish practice. Running Norton's diskwipe is a good thing but at least delete and better yet do a format. They are at risk for malpractice for mishandeling possibly confifential info. Their risk is much greater due to that confidence. Generally, wipe them. If the disk has a possibly useful OS then clean it. Whatever you do respect privacy! I work as a MIS/Sysadmin, in short that means everything in the company can or is seen by me. That also means I have a responsability to keep it to myself where it is known. Since I've been doing this for quite a while and often so I have usable disks! MY standard thing is to let the former owners if known that I will be trying to use the disk and if there is any data found it will be destroyed or at their option copied if possible and returned to them. More often than not the drive is LLF'd as the controller I'm using doesn't like their format. If I plan to pass on the disks I will try to wipe them first or at least make sure nothing grossly dangerous to the former owner is on them. That is assuming I have hardware to do that. Allison