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