Properly wiping a hard drive ?

[mike cloaked]

On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 11:02 PM, mike cloaked <mike.cloaked at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

By the way I have done this with several disks in the past few months
and once complete the disk looks like a brand new clean drive from a
data viewpoint.  If for some reason you can't run these commands,
(which can also be initiated with for example "Ultimate Boot CD") then
resorting to DBAN will do a next best job but will take a lot longer!
-- 
mike c