How to delete all the things off a hard drive seperately

Question

I need to delete all the files off my dying hard drive in Ubuntu v.11.10. If I could have a quick response that would be great because my computer is also dying.

Thanks

Answer 1

Rather an odd question but I'll bite:

1. Download and boot to Live CD
2. Choose "Try Ubuntu" when offered
3. Load up the Partition Editor (gparted) or the Disk Utility (palimpsest)
4. Format the drive.

If you are doing this for security reasons (you don't want the data recovered) see:

• How to delete file(s) in secure manner?
  (and this should be done from the Live environment)

Answer 2

Are you sure you write what you mean ? You want to DELETE ALL YOUR FILES ??

well okay, first find out what device your harddisk is, be it /dev/sda or /dev/sdb or whatever. In the following example I persume it is /dev/sda (if it isn't, just modify my example)

type in a terminal:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=8M

this will wipe your harddrive CLEAN and therefore DELETES EVERYTHING !!