If you want to wipe your hard to clean up partition errors, bad installations, or for privacy, you can use the dd Unix command. To wipe the entire disk and overwrite all partitions, master boot records, and data, you can fill the disk with all zeros using dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M If you are wiping your hard drive for security, you should populate it with random data rather than zeros using dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=1M If you messed up your master boot record (MBR) you can wipe it using dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1 This question was asked on The HowTo Wiki.