Yet another one of those issues that had me searching for the longest time. Zeroing out a Hard Drive is a smart thing to do when you are looking at selling, donating, or just getting rid of a HDD. Just reformatting it DOES NOT WORK! Case in point, shortly before I wrote this, I reformatted a SD Card that had a couple dozen scanned (then shredded) documents on it. Luckily a free program called PhotoRec (Linux) was ready and able to recover everything in just a few minutes.
So what you want to do is Zero the disc by overwriting the whole thing with zeros. Now there are several proprietary tools out there by companies like Western Digital, Seagate, Gateway, Toshiba and so on but in the case of cleaning my gateway laptop (not the best purchase I ever made) none of these options wanted to work.
Linux to the rescue! And no special tool or programs either! Just use this simple command:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<destination partition> bs=1MAnd here is the reasoning:
- dd
- - The name of the function (Data Description) that copies and converts data. dd
- if=/dev/zero
- - the in file (if) will be a zero point director. /dev/zero
- of=/dev/<destination partition>
- - the out file (of) where <destination partition> is the destination drive that you are going to zero out. For example: /dev/sda (usually a main hdd)
- bs=1M
- - the byte size (bs) block that you are going to write. In this case 1mb.
And there you go! One simple method to zero a HDD using Linux!
