Hey, I tried zeroing a hard drive. Unfortunately it takes about 6 minutes per GB, which adds up to 2 days for a 500gig drive. Unfortunately this is my only computer and I can't really let it chill around in BIOS for 2 days straight. Is there any program to write zeros to a drive while in windows?

From Windows it can done with Eraser: http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/. You won't be able to fully wipe the system drive, naturally.

If you want to wipe the whole drive the best way to do that is to download the Darik's Boot and Nuke http://dban.sourceforge.net/ boot CD image, burn it to CD, boot from the CD and select the one-pass only-zeroes option. Should take only an hour or two for 500GB.

Agreeing with mellon here on the method of using a bootable CD. I recommend Ultimate Boot CD. The CD has quite an array of free tools, including drive erasing.

I usually use KillDisk on the Ultimate Boot CD. IRC, the last time I wiped a 320GB drive it took about 3.5 hours.

That's what I was using. but 50 hours is too long.

I'll take alook at the other programs.