Could any LQ members please provide me with the terminal commands that will completely erase everything within a hard drive partition and completely erase everything on a entire hard drive?? Thanks!!

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/devicename

For example, devicename = sda1 erases the partition sda1, devicename = sda erases the disk sda.

You could also use if=/dev/random if you prefer, but I'm not sure it would make much difference.

The command requires root privileges. Use with caution.

Thanks Hydrurga!!

You would normally use that on a non-boot drive. If a boot drive then I'd boot from some live media.

Don't forget to triple check that your /dev/name is the one you want. Trust me on that.

Is there a terminal command that will reveal the exact designation of the hard drive inside of my computer?

lsblk -f should give you what you need.

Can I ask what you're trying to do here? If you're trying to erase the whole hard disk in your computer, you need to boot from another medium. In that case, you could also look at something like Darik's Boot and Nuke (https://dban.org/).

There are many commands for listing information about system installed hard drives and partitions, here are some of them:

cat /proc/partitions

sudo fdisk -l

sudo parted /dev/sda print

df -h


The first command for erasing a disk consists of using the dd Linux / Unix command. After deciding which partition or external disk you want to erase, open the terminal and run this command:

sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdaX

The next command consists of using the shred command line tool. You can erase a disk with this command:

sudo shred --iterations=3 /dev/sdaX

Thank You All Very Much!! I messed up one of my two old computers and I am trying to get the mistakes out of the hard drive!!

In that case you shouldn't really need to erase a partition or disk, just initialise a filesystem in it, either by using a bootable tool such as GParted Live or by simply installing another distro over an older one.

What mistakes do you have?

I bought the repository discs for an old PCLinuxOS system and, as usual, I messed the install up. There were others, much more experienced Linux users, who stated the discs also messed up their computers!! At any rate I have never been able to get rid of all of that junk. I hope to finally get it all out now!!

Ok. What did lsblk -f give you?

Side notes.
Every once in a while you may have to nuke or dd it or wipe a drive. Many newer installer programs refuse to destroy what they think to be a working linux.

It gave me sda.