Complete erase - start from fresh?

How do I completely erase the hard disk and install a fresh system on to it?

Hi Harry:
Gulliver asks a good question: why?
If you've got a lot of clutter and what to start fresh, then his instructions hold true. This is a fast process, and you'll be installing in a couple of minutes.
If you're going to sell the computer, you'll want to be more thorough than a standard erase. In Disk Utility's erase options, you can select whether to write zeroes to the hard drive, or to do an eight-way random write over the drive. Writing zeroes will make it very difficult for the average person to recover any information from the drive; if you're "the CIA is out to get me" paranoid, the eight-way random write makes it all but impossible for anyone to recover anything. Both of these options require much more time. Depending on the size of your hard drive, writing zeroes will take several hours to a day. The eight-way random write will take even longer - days to run.
Andrew

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