Please avoid quoting in backwards order.
http://wiki.ursine.ca/Best_Online_Quoting_Practices
Situations where I personally would never use quick format: Suspect hard
drive to hold data, old hard drive, and a hard drive that was moved from
another PC.
A normal format is probably not thorough enough for data disposal, either.
In addition, I would personally use a zero write utility before
partitioning and formatting in those situations.
The only one I would trust to do what it claims is dd that comes with
Knoppix. Being open source, dd has had public security review that
most "zero write utilities" never get. This is important: You do want the
utilities you use to dispose of data to actually do what they claim, right?
Boot to Knoppix, open a Konsole, then type sudo -s. This should cause the
prompt to change from $ to #. Then type dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda (for
the first PATA hard drive, sda for the first SCSI or SATA hard drive).
Though if you're going to go that route, you might want to do somethign a
little bit more secure than writing zero to every bit on the device: If
you change /dev/zero to /dev/urandom, this will write random data to the
drive instead of zeros. For best results, do this five or six times
with /dev/urandom to ensure someone with knowledge of data forensics can't
recover anything.
