wipe /dev/sda

[cyanics]

Kenneth Loafman wrote:
> Neil Aggarwal wrote:
>   
>> Joep:
>>
>>     
>>> The best way is to use a reasonably strong electromagnet and sweep it 
>>> over the disk. In the old days we did it to wipe magnetic 
>>> tapes.
>>>       
>> Would that work for hard drives? 
>>     
>
> It has to be fairly strong, but yes.  An old TV degausser will also
> work, if you can find one.
>
> ...Ken
>
>   
best option is something like killdisk. The program will write, sector 
by sector, random data to the disk. It will then delete it, and repeat 
multiple times. Final step is that it verifies that no two sectors 
contain sequential data. http://www.killdisk.com/

the process itself meets DoD 5220.22M standards for data security.