full-disclosure - Erasing a hard disk easily

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Message-ID: <20040714155211.GA20134@valjean.si.ocslink.com>
From: james+fulldisc at vincentsystems.com (James Sneeringer)
Subject: Erasing a hard disk easily

On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 07:04:47PM +1000, Darren Reed wrote:
> Too bad the pc Unixes don't have a format command like Sun has had
> for Solaris/SunOS....tells the hard drive to 'format' and then tests
> with a number of test patterns.

This can be done on Linux using badblocks(8).  It has a read-write mode 
that does what you describe.  Most of the mk*fs programs also have their 
own read-only test options.

-James