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

[Srdan Tosovic]

On Thu, 28 May 2009 22:29:23 -0400
Robert L Cochran <cochranb at speakeasy.net> wrote:

> 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?

'shred' is part of coreutils (i.e. installed by default).
Doing something like

shred /dev/sdX

as root will write various bit patterns 25 times over the entire drive
(see the man page for more options).

Srdan