[Full-Disclosure] Erasing a hard disk easily

[James Sneeringer]

On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 07:04:47PM +1000, Darren Reed wrote:
> Too bad the pc Unixes don't have a format command like Sun has had
> for Solaris/SunOS....tells the hard drive to 'format' and then tests
> with a number of test patterns.

This can be done on Linux using badblocks(8).  It has a read-write mode 
that does what you describe.  Most of the mk*fs programs also have their 
own read-only test options.

-James