Coatsy, if the thread can help someone else - heck it'll cover for the headaches. As for the reverse - I can tell you that I'm able to see my files - it's not putting them in the order I want but my files (most of them are there). The scary thing is I know alot of us donate our old computers - you think a format works - but any teenager with time & inclination can recover your files - I've been reading alot of these sites
There are a few products to totally wipe your hard drive - I just didn't bookmark them - here's a quick one - but I'm not sure if it only deletes your everyday files or if it will 'robustly' format your hard drive. The other thing is that the only way it will become unrecoverable is if they are replaced by other files.
Apparently, Evidence Eliminator can do it.
Here are a few others that I found:
http://www.iolo.com/ds/
http://www.east-tec.com/
I hope that helps :-)