DrJBHL

Actually it is useful right now for me. Have a couple flash drives I'm going to be giving away.

Thank you.

Looks like a very good option for flash/USB drives in particular.  Thanks for the info, Doc.

For the hard drive(s) in your computer, should you need to wipe for resale/gifting/recycling, DBAN (Darik's Boot And Nuke) is also a good option (link).  I had to wipe a dozen or so XP rigs a year or two ago before recycling the hardware and it works well.  Won't do flash drives or SSD's, however.

if anyone is interested, here is what I usually do when I want to wipe a disk

method 1:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/files

like Daiwa already mentioned before

method 2a:

in case you are not using linux boot from a debian live image (https://www.debian.org/CD/live/)

open a terminal

$ sudo fdisk -l # search for the disk you want to delete and remeber its device name (something like /dev/sda)

$ sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=4M # this will completely overwrite disk a, including boot record etc. with random data, so doublecheck what you write after "of="

you can also wipe partitions, e. g.  "/dev/sda2" will be partition 2 on disk a

method 2b:

in case you are not using linux boot from a debian live image (https://www.debian.org/CD/live/)

open a terminal

$ sudo apt-get install cryptsetup gddrescue # install cryptsetup and ddrescue

$ devicel=/dev/sda # write the device you want to wipe into a variable so you can copy/paste the next line

$ sudo cryptsetup open --type plain --key-file /dev/urandom ${devicel} to_be_wiped # create a plain encrypted container using random passphrase

$ sudo ddrescue  -f /dev/zero /dev/mapper/to_be_wiped # overwrite container with zeroes, which will be random data on the device

here you basically use the linux encryption software cryptstetup to write random data to your device

using ddrescue instead of dd will give you a simple status feedback

this will be much faster than method 2b and also method 1, about 2-3 hours for a conventional 1 TB hdd (depends on your hardware)

dont be afraid to try out method 2, linux is great for those kind of things