So there is this computer that I want to throw/donate away. But I want to make sure none of the information in there could be extracted somehow. So what one needs to do is to pop in a live CD of Ubuntu (Knoppix and others will do), open the console and find out what device is the harddisk you want to wipe. Then in a root console do:

dd if=/dev/zero ( Read more... )

So, I had this problem a couple of times, so now I'm going to document the fix for it ( Read more... )