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

[Alan Cox]

> '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).

Whoopeeedoo. Thats still not the correct way to erase a disk.

Use security erase, that is why it is there.