How to wipe a hard drive clean in Linux

You may need to wipe you hard drive to clean up partition errors, bad installations, or for privacy. This will show you howto do this

These methods use a command called dd

Wiping the entire disk

This will overwrite all partitions, master boot records, and data.

• Filling the disk with all zeros (This may take a while, as it is making every bit of data 0) :

  dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M

• If you are wiping your hard drive for security, you should populate it with random data rather than zeros (This is going to take even longer than the first example.) :

  dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=1M

• Can also try the command "shred" ex: # shred -n 6 -z -v /dev/sdb

Wiping the Master boot record (MBR)

If you messed up your master boot record (MBR) you can wipe it using this command :

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1

Wiping partitions

You can wipe a partition using the same method than for the whole disk. Just replace the device identifier. If /dev/sda is the whole disk, then (on Linux, because the naming scheme vary from one Unix to another) /dev/sda3 is the third partition on the disk.

• Filling the second partition on the /dev/sda disk with all zeros :

  dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda2 bs=1M

• Filling the third partition with random data :

  dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda3 bs=1M

References

• Clean Hard Drive (zero fill)
• MBR
  
  
  From HowTo Wiki, a Wikia wiki.