Check out:

http://www.dban.org

- Henrik

From: fedora-list-bounces@redhat.com [mailto:fedora-list-bounces@redhat.com] On Behalf Of Fernando Cassia
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 2:51 PM
To: Community assistance, encouragement, and advice for using Fedora.
Subject: Re: OT: Can Reformatting A Hard Drive To ext3 Destroy All the Data On It?

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 6:00 PM, Mike McCarty <Mike.McCarty@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

Robert L Cochran 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?

I haven´t done this task from Linux, but if you´ve got access to a windows computer (or VM)  and you can install the drive into an external USB enclosure, use this GPL program
http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/

FC