Writing Zeros?

[Chipfryer]

Folks my wife has just passed down a PC to me that I built for her. It has Windows on it but I want to clean it all off.

I did have a Seagate utility DWSE.exe that would take forever but it would write zeros.
How do I go about this using Linux please? I have a 250 Gig hardrive. I did read about passes and such but I'm not sure what to do about this?

Many thanks.

[Havoc]

One of those wonderfull cryptic ancient unix commands: dd
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)

Corrected link, it dropped the last paranthese

[Chipfryer]

Says page missing on there DD?

One of those wonderfull cryptic ancient unix commands: dd
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)

[Chipfryer]

This looks similar to what I used before.....
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<destination partition>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/zero

[Chipfryer]

I finally used ActiveKill. It's free and uses one pass. I kept getting permission errors and I want my Linux studio asap.

[MattKingUSA]

This looks similar to what I used before.....
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<destination partition>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/zero

I use dd as well. It seems to always get the job done. Just login as root first.