I built my parents a new computer a while back and, to my disappointment, instead of giving their old one to me (he said, surrounded by 6 computers) they've decided to sell/donate it as it's still a fairly decent machine.

The problem is I've told them not to do anything with it until they've zero filled the hard drive. If I give them step by step instructions on how to do it from a live distro using dd, they could manage to do it. It seemed to me, however, that there's got to be a tool or live distro that could make it a few clicks for them and fewer instructions from me. Any suggestions?

DBAN

This message lengthened to abide by forum rules...

Google is nice.. first hit:

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Damn you pljvaldez, no one is faster than I am.. ever, ever I tell you..

Wow. That was fast. Thanks to both of you.

What were your search terms? Best I got was a post here using 'dd'.

Well, you wanted a bootable utility to wipe a disk with ease... so "bootable wipe disk"

I use killdisk.
http://www.killdisk.com/bootablecd.htm

I just got lucky. We use DBAN at work before transfering machines between staff members, so I already knew about it...

Yeah, I recalled DBAN myself but I like to use google searches to point out to users that it's not impossible to find before asking questions.

...and then there's those of us who search, but fail to dumb things down and search, "linux zero fill hard drive" and "zero fill live distro"

I actually got to kill disk, but I knew there was an open source program out there that would do it and I had never heard of kill disk before.