How to clear the entire space of a hard drive

Zope · 08-06-2013, 01:05 AM

Hello Everyone,

I have a Hard drive installed as /dev/sdb1/, everything on that disk has been already saved onto another hard drive and now I need to empty the disk. When I reconnected the disk to the computer it's contents poped out on a window and I thought "this shouldn't be so different than windows and just selected the folders and deleted. Now if I do df I can still see that the space on the disk is still used and that the disk still has 85% of its space occupied. I already tried dd, but the same thing appears when I do df. If in terminal I cd to the directory where the disk was mounted and do ls, it looks empty. I need to delete the entirety of the data so I can copy other data into this file. What can I do?

Thanks,

Rodrigo

evo2 · 08-06-2013, 01:07 AM

Hi,

have you considered deleting and recreating the partition? (eg with fdisk)

Evo2.

EDDY1 · 08-06-2013, 01:09 AM

You can reformat with your disk utility.
What operating system?

eSelix · 08-06-2013, 04:40 AM

Are you sure about "/dev/sdb1" - it is not a whole disk it is one partition. The whole disk would be "/dev/sdb". Do not repartition it if you do not want to lose data from other partitions, if you have any more. Please paste output of

Code:

fdisk -l
df -h
ls -la /your_mouting_point_of_sdb1

k3lt01 · 08-06-2013, 05:10 AM

Download DBAN, burn it to a disk. turn off your PC, disconnect the disk you want to keep safe and leave the disk you want to wipe connected. Reboot with the DBAN disk in the disc drive and wipe the disk following the instructions in the screen. When thats done reconnect the other disk and restart your PC.