Command Line to wipe a hard drive

[Forester]

Need to wipe a hard drive.

Hi Seabean1 and welcome to the Knoppix forums.

No reply ? Perhaps what you are asking is not what you need. I think most reading your post will say to themselves "Anyone who knows what they are doing would not have to ask how to do something so dangerous". There certainly isn't a nice command line that is guaranteed not to wipe the wrong hard drive for you.

Could you tell a little of what you are trying to achieve or what has gone wrong for you ?

Usually it is enough to repartition your disk and create new file systems. Wiping the hard drive is something you'd only need to do you've confidential data or naughty pictures on the drive you really need to destroy. There's special disk wiping software available for that.

You sure it's a hard drive 'cos flash drives are different. You sure it the whole drive and not just a partition ?

[Seabean1]

Thank-you for your response. I work in a data center and I've been asked to wipe all hard drives before decommissioning a server. Normally, we have a service punch a hole in the drive, but this one device is being shipped out for reuse at another center. Thanks.