deleting and os

[Les Gray]

On Monday 13 August 2007 09:33:53 Les Gray wrote:
> On Monday 13 August 2007 09:14:42 James Takac wrote:
> > Thx Les
> >
> > You're the 3rd to respond so far and the basic theme seems to be a
> > reinstall of ubuntu would be the best option. Looks like I'll go that way
> > then
> >
> > James
>
> If you go the reinstall route I would also 'zero-fill' the drive first
> before putting anything else on it. This makes the drive cleaner for
> re-use, instead of just creating a new filesystem on it.
>
> You can do this using the diagnostic utility of the drive's manufacturer
> or, better yet, the versatile linux 'dd' command, which you can access from
> a terminal within the live CD. Zero-filling is done like this -
>
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd* bs=1M
>
> Change /dev/hd* to whatever is applicable in your case. This just writes
> zeroes to the drive until there's no space left, at which point it stops.
> Then you have a nice clean hard disk.
>
> Les

PS. Make sure the drive is UNMOUNTED when zero-filling. I think dd warns you 
if it is, but it's important not to anyway.