Free Software to Securely Erase a Hard Drive

The command is "shred". It's part of coreutils; a basic command of the system.

If you want a graphical frontend, you can install the nautilus-wipe package to add "wipe" menu entries to GNOME's file manager.

name at domain wrote:
> Is there a free software program to securely erase/wipe a hard drive?

I understand DBAN (https://www.dban.org/) will do that job in freedom.
You can get source code under a Free Software licenses (LGPLv2 and
GPLv2, according to the Sourceforge.net summary) from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/

Thanks opon4!

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/low-level-formatting.html

I prefer to zero it because I use full disk encryption but if you don't
you can use:

cryptsetup -c aes-xts-essiv:sha256 -y -s 512 luksFormat /dev/sdx1
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdx1 empty
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mapper/empty

--
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If it is for HDD disposal a friend who works in the software end of electronics design for military and security customers uses a BBQ and doesn't stand downwind of it while it's cooking. YMMV but drive firmware is so sophisticated these days it's hard to be certain of software tools unless you started out with full disk encryption.

I tend to use ATA secure erase through hdparm, see https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase. Also try dban.org (not sure what licence).