Howto securely erase a harddrive .

Simply deleting, formating or zero writing a hard drive is not enough to keep a determined individual from restoring data from a hard drive. To ensure that your data really is deleted use a CD based distribution such as knoppix to boot the computer.

You can either issue the following commands seperated by a semicolon (;) or put them into a script. This is essentially a fire and forget process, but it will take a really long time.

Also, each pattern (writing 0’s, 1s, and random) should be done 4 to 8 times for maximum security.