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

[Clint Dilks]

Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> Robert L Cochran writes:
>
>> I have a hard drive that I need to destroy the data on. What is the 
>> most dependable way to do this? Can reformatting the drive as ext3 or 
>> ext4 or some other filesystem effectively destroy the existing data?
>>
>> Is there free software that can write zeroes or some form of nonsense 
>> to every storage location?
>
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/youbettergetthisright bs=1M
>
If you want to be really sure you need to do the command above several 
time or use software like

http://www.dban.org/