OT: Can Reformatting A Hard Drive To ext3 Destroy All the Data On It?

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 16:49:03 -0400,
  Robert L Cochran <cochranb at speakeasy.net> wrote:
>
> Thanks to all who answered. I'm anxious to try out Alan's "security  
> erase" suggestion on a much newer drive. It appears to be a lot less  
> labor intensive.

If you are really worried about this, set up encrypted partitions when
you install on the new drive, so the unencrypted bits (other than stuff
in /boot) never get to the drive in the first place.