[CentOS] Looking for a good disk exerciser

On Fri, 13 Apr 2007, Mark Hull-Richter wrote:

> Capstone (so to speak):
> 
> I booted from the Seagate CD and ran both the quick and full diagnostics on
> the disk.  It failed them both.
> 
> Now I'm wondering what's the best way to destroy all the data on the drive
> so I can return it without my stuff, unreliable or not, on it.
> 
> I suppose a dd from /dev/zero to the whole disk might work - am I right?
> I'm not sure what block size or how many - it's a 400Gb drive....
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Mark Hull-Richter, Linux Kernel Engineer

Or even better badblocks -w

I would add -v and -p some_number
See man page.

Some of your data can be left in reallocated sectors.

Wojtek