*Ok, so technically it’s not zero filling the drive, but I like saying it.
So, lets say you want to get rid of a hard drive, the first thing you should do after removing it from active service is make sure you really want to get rid of it and won’t miss anything on it. After that, and before you actually say good bye it’s a good idea to wipe it of its contents; the last thing you want to do is to toss it next to a dumpster, still full of all its data and waiting for anyone to come along.
Reformatting the drive isn’t sufficient, so if you really want to wipe the drive and sent i out into the world, here’s an easy tool:
You burn the iso image to a cd and boot from it. This allows you the option of removing any other hard drives from your computer, to make sure ONLY the one you want killed will be killed.
In case you’re wondering, to zero-fill (within Linux) you can use the following command:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
Where hda is the location of your drive to kill. if/dev/random is a better option as it used random data. think of it like erasing a piece of paper, then writing jiberish over it again to make sure no one can read what was thre before.
fdisk -l can be helpful in determining what the location of the intended drive is.