Most hard drive manufacturers provide a free utility, which is specific to
their drives, that will do this. I know Seagate, Maxtor, IBM, and Western
Digital all provide a utility that will do this. IBM also has a universal
DOS utility posted called Wipe.com that will write zeroes to a hard drive,
BUT only up to the first 8 GBs.

If your intention is to cleanse the drive you can also use something like
Norton Utilities Wipe after you have erased your data. Setup to do so, this
is capable of wiping your drive up to government security specifications.
If you use a write zero utility, I would run it three or more times
depending on your level of paranoia!

Rode
The NOSPIN Group



>     Can someone tell me how to write zeroes to a hard drive before it is
> discarded or passed on to other people for use?  Is there a Dos Command
> for it or do I need to download a third party software?  Thanks.

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