# Bootable Zero Fill Program Needed



## P2PGURU4U (Dec 30, 2004)

Looking for a simple program that I can boot onto from a cd rom to Zero Fill my hard drive.

Used to do this back in the day with floppy's but lost the program and new computer doesn't have a floppy drive.


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## leroys1000 (Aug 16, 2007)

The manufacturers web site should have the diagnostic utilities
for download on thier website.
These uasually include write zeros to the drive.


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## WhitPhil (Oct 4, 2000)

Presumably, you are trying to wipe the drive before you either sell it or get rid of it?

Regardless, see Elvandil's list here


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## lotuseclat79 (Sep 12, 2003)

Boot up any Linux Live CD (Knoppix recommended, also Ubuntu), and run the shred command:
$ sudo shred -n 2 -z -v /dev/hda1

where -n 2 indicates two passes for writing random data
-z indicates finish the wipe by overwriting the drive with zeros
-v shows your shred's progress
and /dev/hda1 indicates the partition to be shredded.

If you don't know the partition to be shredded, just run the command:
$ sudo fdisk -l
and look for an indication of NTFS for your Windows hard drive in the /dev/hdxx terminology.

Use the menu pull-downs to open up a command line window aka Terminal in which to execute the above commands.

You can download and burn the Linux Live CDs (ISO images) from here.

-- Tom


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