What MMario said, overwrite the thing a couple of times, that's how companies usually eliminate old data, by writing over the top of it.

Formatting after you overwrite, maybe, to get rid of some of those directories, but I'd still do the overwrite thing.

That or an ice pick and a magnet, but then the store might not buy your story about the flaw with the drive in the first place.

How is it you can do all of this diagnostic stuff on a flawed hard drive? Usually when they're dead they're dead and you have to access them in the slave drive position. Is that what you're doing? And you can write to it this way, but it doesn't work with the OS?

If you're looking for something big to write onto it to save time, versus lots of tiny files, films are anywhere from 4 to 9 gig. Run Shrink DVD (if you have Nero and an operating system older than VISTA) and copy a few of your DVDs onto your computer and part the files on that drive, each in its own folder (or it will overwrite the last one). You could do one or two large films and drop the contents into different folder names and cover the top of that hard drive pretty quickly.

SRS

P.S. Considering your predicament, if I were you I'd stick with the G-rated variety for your overwriting.