How to prepare a hdd for sale
 

I have a Seagate barracuda ES 500 GB hard drive that I want to clean up so it can be sold.
It has two partitions and lots of data on it.. It's a sata drive.
My question is how can I clean everything off of it, and make the whole disk available for
a new operating system.
Should I format it first and then delete the partitions or delete the partitions first then format it?
or does it matter?
If I do this will the HDD be seen by a new computer when it's installed? Or will it have to be initialized?

I am using windows7 home premium on this computer, i have also got Acronis true image, and
EaseUS partition manager installed. Or perhaps there is another program that will take care of
the whole process in one fail swoop...

The Seagate is hooked to a usb port via an adapter that works fine.
There is probably a tutorial somewhere on this subject, but so far I have been unable to find it.
Many thanks for all your excellent help..

I would use a program called KILL DISK, (it's free) and will write zero's to the drive and make it very hard for anyone to get any data off of it. I would KILL the whole drive, then partition it as one partition. The software can walk you through it.

Ok, I'm trying to use this program to kill the disk, it gets to the point where a box
appears that asks are you sure u want to erase all the data on this disk, and there is a space to type in the answer, if I type yes, it says wrong security code entered in the log window.... so how do I progress from there? I know of no security code to enter.. and searching their help does no good either...

So at this point I'm kinda stuck... any idea ?

Never mind.. I found out how to do it... thanks anyway....

OK, let us know how it goes. Should clean the drive up good.