Try Boot and Nuke HERE.

Or use a win95/98 startup diskette and run fdisk. delete the partition, create a new partition and format.

 

 

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

If by recycling u mean someone else might be using your hard disk in he future, i would go for a utility that wipes your hard disk with encryption methods so that your data cannot be undeleted. There's alot of programs that do that

 

This is a useful article:

 

http://www.pcworld.com/article/110338/answer_line_wipe_your_drive_clean_of_all_its_sensitive_data.html

 

 

Thanks everyone for your responses and suggestions. My old desktops were being turned into an electronic recycling program (all sorts of electronics).  I don't think the machines are being salvaged for reuse but rather broken down to individual parts.  Since I was not able to find time to use another utility, I took out and opened up the hard drives, manually scratched and bent all of the actual disks.

 

I actually even tried to drive over the entire drive but the solid aluminum casing was too strong to crush.

In the military we would open the drive, and sandpaper the platters until the media (the brown) was gone.  Technically we were supposed to then destroy the platters themselves, but since it was for unclassified systems it wasn't required.  Got some nice parts for going-away give clocks that way, too. ;)

Here's what I have done, I remove the hard drive and then recycle or bring the PC to the dump.

 

Then I put the hard drive in my basement.   If it's in my basement then peopl ewon't be getting data off it.  And maybe I'll be able to put it in one of those hard drive external cases and connect it to a newer PC and get files off it.  Who knows?  If I can't do that, then it's still safe in my basement.