Re: Inquiry:How to totally wipe out the entire hard drive

[Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net>]

On 2009-09-06 07:10, John Hasler wrote:
> H.Motamedi writes:
> > Can you please let me know how can I totally wipe out the entire of my
> > hard drive under Debian OS ?
>
> Depends on what you want to accomplish.  If you merely want to make the
> disk appear empty use fdisk to delete all the partitions.  If you want
> to destroy all the data for security purposes install and use shred.  It
> will take quite a while on a large disk.

This really is a myth.

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html
From the Epilogue:
    For any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a few passes of random
    scrubbing is the best you can do. As the paper says, "A
    good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as
    can be expected". This was true in 1996, and is still true
    now.

So, just run "dd if=/dev/urandom of=..." over it a couple of times.

--
Brawndo's got what plants crave.  It's got electrolytes!