Properly wiping a hard drive ?

[James Mckenzie]

Linuxguy123 <linuxguy123 at gmail.com> wrote:
>Sent: Oct 8, 2010 12:59 PM
>To: James Mckenzie <jjmckenzie51 at earthlink.net>, Community support for Fedora users <users at lists.fedoraproject.org>
>Subject: Re: Properly wiping a hard drive ?
>
>On Fri, 2010-10-08 at 12:39 -0700, James Mckenzie wrote:
>> Linux guy:
>> 
>> Ball peen hammer.
>
>Its a new drive.  I'm returning it for a refund.
>
I said that a little tongue in cheek and with a lot of humor.  If the drive were dead, I would suggest that you get a commercial RMA with only returning the smashed drive.

Other folks have suggested using Dban, wipe and dd.  These should suffice if you don't want prying eyes to get to your data.  Even the simple dd command will work if you don't mind them asking what happened to the drive.  As long as the three letter folks are not looking at the drive, you should be safe with these.

BTW, what was the reason that the drive would not 'fit' into your laptop?

James McKenzie