How to completely erase hard drive?

Question

Possible Duplicate:
How can I securely erase a USB hard drive?
How to delete file(s) in secure manner?

I am looking for software/script/whatever that can completely destroy data on hard drive. By destroy I mean beyond recovery(even with special software). Is there any way to do this? Thanks.

Solution 1

The tool named wipe deletes data permanently on HDD. To install it using terminal

sudo apt-get install wipe

To wipe out all data within a whole HDD type in terminal.

sudo wipe /dev/sdaX

where X is your partition.

Solution 2

Would this be something you'd be looking for?

sudo -i
shred -f -n 5 -z [Location of drive]

If you want to make shred do more distortion-application, then bring up shred's help:

shred --help

or

man shred

Solution 3

DBAN http://www.dban.org/ is commonly used for that purpose, it is an iso image which you burn to a CD (or other media), boot, and write random data over the disk multiple times (depending on settings).

Somewhat similar to something like

dd if=/dev/urandom of=#disk path#

Though I presume DBAN might have more options and a nicer interface

Comments

[user68186]

See the accepted answer to this question: askubuntu.com/questions/17640/…

[zuberuber]

Do I have to use wipe from live-cd to format my main hard-drive where my OS is installed?

[zuberuber]

Do I have to use shred from live-cd to format my main hard-drive where my OS is installed?

[Omio]

That would be best, since if you're running off a dual-boot, you would shred the "disk" file that Ubuntu is running from.

[jack]

How do I figure out my Partition?

[Noah Spurrier]

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/DRIVEDEVICE is faster.