Wiping donated computers for recycling question

[Theo Schmidt]

Belinda Lopez schrieb:
...
 > Does the standard installation process where one selects 'Use entire disk' do 
a good enough job of wiping the hard drive of any prior data?
 >
 > Given that most of these systems will be used in schools or by kids, these 
organisations want to avoid any possibility that any old data might be left on 
the systems.

Unless you actually overwrite the entire disk, clever people can recover some of 
the files with a tool like testdisk/photorec. I did this with a new formatted 
hard disk from a jumble sale and was amazed at all the stuff still on it, 
including porn videos!

The solution is simple: from the live DVD do something like: "dd if=/dev/zero 
of=/dev/sda" (Maybe somebody can verify that this is correct.) This will write 
zeros onto the entire disk (sda would be the first hard disk, so take care if 
there are several.) It will take quite some time and there is no progress 
editor. I'm sure Ubuntu also provides some graphical tool for this.

Theo Schmidt