deleting and os

[Les Gray]

On Monday 13 August 2007 09:14:42 James Takac wrote:
> Thx Les
>
> You're the 3rd to respond so far and the basic theme seems to be a
> reinstall of ubuntu would be the best option. Looks like I'll go that way
> then
>
> James

If you go the reinstall route I would also 'zero-fill' the drive first before 
putting anything else on it. This makes the drive cleaner for re-use, instead 
of just creating a new filesystem on it.

You can do this using the diagnostic utility of the drive's manufacturer or, 
better yet, the versatile linux 'dd' command, which you can access from a 
terminal within the live CD. Zero-filling is done like this -

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd* bs=1M

Change /dev/hd* to whatever is applicable in your case. This just writes 
zeroes to the drive until there's no space left, at which point it stops. 
Then you have a nice clean hard disk.

Les