Help wiping a hard drive

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Really, the best way for someone that does not want to get overly complicated or spend any more money on this is to simply take out the HD, and destroy it. Smash it with a hammer, throw it in the fireplace when you have a fire going, etc etc etc. The hammer method is the easiest, just get a hammer and a few nails and open the HD (unscrew the screws) and punch a few holes in it then hit it to bend the disk.

Hope this helps

Do wear eye-protection. Modern disk platters are made from glass or glass-like materials and will shatter.

A single zero-fill or random-fill using dd (dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb) or similar Linux utility will overwrite the drive in a way that no normal user can extract any meaningful data. If you are not the target of the FBI or someone with a lot of money and specialist equipment, then overwriting the data is effective.

A simple format, even a low-level format, may leave data (banking details, personal data) on the "free" area of the disk that can be recovered with testdisk, photorec or other tools.

That's my preferred technique. No mangled drive fragments to clear up!

I use a dd command, too. I check to see if it is finishes properly by running "fdisk -l".

Back in the day, we used something called a 'bulk tape eraser', which essentially was a large electromagnet...
If you want to go to tinfoil country, find a arc welder or steel furnace and melt the thing into slag. Recover that, buster!...