I'd like to ask : is there a command for wiping a partition, not the whole disk ?

In DOS/Win, the "format /u <drive>" command wipes off data while creating the fs.

In Linux, "mke2fs -v -c <partition>" does not seem to do a similar job.

From the command line try executing

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But "shred" is for a single file.

I'm not familiar with the shred command, but if you are using the Gnome desktop environment, install Gparted - it is a very simple gui that makes partitioning very easy. If you are somewhat brave, you can use cfdisk. If you are really brave, you can use fdisk;

Try these commands and learn:

blkid (as root)

fdisk -l

cfdisk /dev/sda
fdisk /dev/sda

DBAN http://www.dban.org/, scrub http://linux.die.net/man/1/scrub

When all is a file in Linux, shred should also accept /dev/sda7 or whatever. Another way could be to fill it with zeros by dd beforehand:and then create the file system in it as usual.

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???
[Solved]?

In Linux, everything is a file. Even drive partitions.

You should be more specific about what you mean with "wiping". If you only wish to create an empty partition, possibly with a new/different-than-before filesystem in place of an existing partition, you can use pretty much any partitioning tool (that can work with the partition types you want) such as fdisk or gparted. Just choose to delete the old partition and create a new one--should not take much time. If you instead mean you want to securely thrash all the data on that partition, so that it is not recoverable any more, the problem is more difficult. Tools like shred (mentioned in earlier posts) would be what you want, and they can work on partitions as well. However they don't typically work with today's journalled filesystems, so in case you use one, you'll need to take care that you work outside of the filesystem--thrash the whole thing, not just single files. Here "thrashing" means that you overwrite all of the data so many times that recovering it becomes extremely difficult. The only permanent solution I know of, that is not recoverable by any means, is to melt the whole disk into a pile of goo and then get rid of it in an appropriate way--slightly easier, but still effective method is to take a drill and make holes to the disk (tossing it into a fireplace is not going to help much). Every software solution has its limits up to the point where the disk is physically "damaged" such that there are no tracks of the original data anywhere, and that's difficult.

Actually, if you just want to turn a partition into another partition (e.g. re-format it; Windows/DOS formatting tool does just that, it doesn't actually remove any data, just like the other such tools), you can do it using any tool on any operating system, as far as they understand the format(s) you want. Windows, OS X, Linux, you name it.

In view of the nature of the problem I'd have thought a file (sic!) to "smooth" the surface of the disk would be appropriate .

also look at dd with if=/dev/urandom

There was a recent discussion about it.

Thank you very much for all the replies.

I've done several experiments yesterday, and found that both "shred" and "dd" could do the job.

As I've stated in my original question, I just want to wipe a partition, not the whole disk, because I have other data partitions on the same disk.

Before asking for help in this forum, I've also played with "cfdisk". I used it to delete the target partition (say /dev/sdb3), then "Write", replied "yes", "Quit", and then reboot the system.
After the reboot, I invoked "cfdisk" again. It correctly reported that the original /dev/sdb3 was gone, leaving a "Free Space". Then I proceeded to re-create the partition, but it automaticaly recognized that the fs was "ext3".
I saved the partition table and quit "cfdisk". When I tried "mount /dev/sdb3 /mnt", I found that all my old files came back in /mnt !!
The "mkfs.ext3 -v /dev/sdb3" command does not really wipe the old data off either.

Thanks again for your answers.

That is as it should be . All those *fdisk programs write to the partition table, not to the partition. (As an aside, I once wiped "accidentally" my partition table -- and rebuilt it from an old printout without the loss of a single datum in the file systems of the hard disk).

Formatting, i.e. creating a file system prepares the structures in the file system (look for inode e.g. on Wikipedia), again not touching the data.

If you want those mangled / shredded / thrashed you have to write data (as dd or shred do).