problem cleaning up old drive

[nepal google]

On Friday 21 Nov 2008, Hakan Koseoglu wrote:
> > I have a 40gb hda drive that I want to completely erase
> > and try to re-use following the problems I've had and
> > reported to the list.
>
> If you are destroying the disk, use DBAN or similar.

Not destroying, I would like to be able to reuse it, but 
would like to clear everything off, and even check to see 
if it is still useable. 

This is so embedded in my brain! years ago with dos I would 
have typed in g=c800:5 which would have run a low level 
format from the disk bios itself and checked for bad 
sectors and marked them. Something like that. Is that what 
dban does, or does it just erase at a low level so no data 
can be retrieved? It is not data security I am concerned 
with, just reusing the disk if it is still operable, if all 
the errors are because it is quietly crumbling apart I 
would like to know and then dump it.

nepal.