OK, that is not a "cheap little program" that the guy used.................it is not what I would call "expensive", but it certainly works (as Wolfman will confim? )

I estimate that it took 15~16 hours for the first pass, that overwrote the drive with zeroes, second pass would be ones and the third random ...........that would be basic DoD requirements, but I doubt if the guy went that far

My personal approach would be to dismount the HDD from the lappy, whack my converter block onto it and slave it to a lab machine (basically any desktop will act as a master system)

Then just format the drive and create an active partition.............

Problem is that the Dell recovery disk won't work............?

1. Partition drive as 93/7 as already suggested
2. Use FAT32 rather than NTFS.............I could be wrong, but I think that a lot of lappies still ship with FAT32?