[Tfug] Wiping out a hard drive

[Linux Media]

Hi,

I want to wipe out any trace of my existence on a laptop hard drive.

I want to keep the hard drive (otherwise I would hammer the disks until 
they were shards). I know I have cloned a drive, but not sure I have 
ever attempted to wiped one out. I do know that when I tried to clone a 
drive it took forever (24 hours before I gave up). I'm assuming it's 
somewhat the same process, and assume it would take as long. I believe 
the command is...

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<destination partition>

Do I want to go with this? If so, is there some switch that would make 
it faster?

Also, is it true that it's safer to 'zero it out' by doing the above 
several times?

If the answer is that this will take forever no matter what switches I 
use, is there some other approach that's effective that would be faster?

Thanks,
Rocco