Wipe a disk using dd

You may need to wipe you hard drive to clean

up partition errors, bad installations, or for privacy. This will show you howto do this

These methods use a command called dd

Wiping the entire disk

This will overwrite all partitions, master boot records, and data.

Filling the disk with all zeros (This may take a while, as it is making every bit of data 0) :

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M

If you are wiping your hard drive for security, you should populate it with random data rather than zeros (This is going to take even longer than the first example.) :

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=1M