Hey everyone. I'm currently looking to switch to Debian from Windows. I used to love windows, but with every upgrade it seems I lose privacy, control and honestly functionality. Sure, there's a lot more I can, if that wasn't mitigated by what windows wants me to do at the time. I should have never even moved on to 10...constantly interrupting or flogging my system to ask me to upgrade in the middle of sensitive work should have been my tip off....I digress...
My question is this: I know what Zero and Random fills do to a drive, I run them on every USB and Sd/MSD card I buy or retrieve, and everytime I repurpose them. But I've never done this to a HDD and my laptop is my only accessible PC aside from my Galaxy S6. I've backed up all my important documents to multiple cloud locations, so I'm not worried about losing user data. I'm just wandering, is it safe to Zero Fill an HDD before installing Debian from a USB ISO? I know I can boot to the ISO and Zero or Random Fill, or other sani methods from the USB Booted Debian, but will doing this to my hard drive stop me from being able to install from the USB to the HDD? I guess because I've never really messed with the BIOS in windows, aside from neccisity, I'm just worried if I zero fill and for some reason my laptop reboots before the new install, it won't boot from the USB anymore and thus make me have to find another computer from which to install DB. This is probably a rookie question, but better safe then sorry with my first full HDD sanitzation. Thanks!!!