When I decided to throw my old dual boot Ubuntu + Win XP Laptop away I wanted to really wipe out all data from the hard disk – just for safety these days … I  wondered how it would be possible to do this because I did not find a „low level format“ option in the BIOS of the machine (and I do not trust format-tools based on Windows platform).

The Windows XP partition already was broken somehow, XP didn’t boot any more so
I had to do this from Ubuntu (which BTW also showed lots of disk related errors at boot time, but finally came up and presented the GDM login – yes, it IS SUPREME….)

Erasing and really wiping out the disk from Linux is much easier than I thought, just use the free GNU shred tool:

„sudo shred -vfz -n 10 /dev/sda“
(replace /dev/sda with whatever your disk drive is named)

that’s it — much easier and quicker than dismounting the hard disk out of the laptop and driving over it 20 times with your car 🙂