yea I'm only wiping the partition(and all files that were there)

I was gonna use shred but OS X doens't have shred! I do have dd though so dd will have to do. they should be able to do the same thing right?

does /dev/disk2s5 just tell dd which sectors to write to, and then it just writes data there - irregardless of file system? which means if I'm writing zeroes or random data the bs option doesn't matter?

and what exactly does notrunc do? I read the man pages but I don't quite understand....

thanks

Check out Eraser. It's a free and under GNU. However, you need windows to create the linux boot disk. It's very good and offers many options on wiping the drive clean. After creating the floopy just pop it into the drive before booting up and it'll load up the linux kernel.

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/e...ser57Setup.zip

Darik's Boot and Nuke: Quick Commands
ÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ

You may enter these commands at the boot prompt. In each case, all disks in
the computer will be wiped automatically without confirmation.

dod Wipe all disks with the DoD 5220-22.M method.
ops2 Wipe all disks with the RCMP TSSIT OPS-II method.
gutmann Wipe all disks with the Gutmann method.
prng Wipe all disks with the PRNG Stream method.
quick Wipe all disks with the Quick Erase method.