[Tfug] Wiping out a hard drive

[Linux Media]

 >> 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

> I always use Darik's Boot and Nuke - www.dban.org.
> 
> It *does* take a while, but, depending on the size of your drive, not 
> more than an hour or so.
> 
> -Josh

Thanks everyone for your responses. I went with DBAN just because of the 
number of responses.

I choose the default setting. Is this usually good enough? I mean good 
enough for someone that is not going to be targeted by someone with 
expensive equipment and time to waste on some lay person like me.

It said there were zero errors. I did suspect that the disk had problems 
prior to using DBAN, only because the last install had errors. But that 
could have been my internet connection (it was a net install). Would 
this matter much?

Thanks,
Rocco