Properly wiping a hard drive ?

[mike cloaked]

On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 8:31 PM, Linuxguy123 <linuxguy123 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I bought a hard drive and wrote a bunch of information to it as an
> external drive only to find that it won't fit in my laptop as an
> internal drive.
>
> How do I absolutely destroy all the data on the drive so that I may
> safely return it to the retailer for a refund ?

I believe the best way is to use "Secure Erase" which is initiated at
the HD firmware level via an hdparm command in Linux - this allows the
erase to be done by the firmware on the drive itself and once
initiated will prevent access to the drive until it completes.

https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase

HTH
-- 
mike c