Wipe Clean External Hard Drive

[i_like_you]

I have an old Lacie 250 GB external hard drive that I bought a couple years ago, and I want to give it to my brother. But before I do, I want to wipe it clean, using something like Darin's Nuke and Boot. I tried using Darin's Nuke and Boot, but it didn't recognize the external usb drive. I know I can reformat the external drive with GParted, but I want to completely erase the data on it so that nothing can be recovered (were someone to run one of those undelete programs). I've searched Google for tutorials but, to my surprise, haven't been able to find any instructions on how to perform this task using Linux.

[Limpan]

You could use something like this to write random data to sdXX (you'll have to figure out the device name of the external drive, usually sdd or something.
dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdXX bs=8M
To write with zeroes instead of random you'd have to do
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdXX bs=8M
It will take a long time to do this either way.
To be absolutely positively certain that nobody would ever read it you'd have to totally destroy the disk. To be reasonably certain I'd say 3 rewrites of random data would do it.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=240257

[i_like_you]

Thank you! I was looking for a program that might do the trick, but couldn't find one with a gui. So I used your method and it worked! I ran it three times, twice with zeros, and once with random data. It took about three hours for each run-through.

[Limpan]

Just out of curiosity, where the random run any slower than the ones with zeroes?

[i_like_you]

Actually, I spoke too soon regarding the random runthrough. I wiped the disk using zeros, and I did that twice. Each time it took 2 1/2-3 hours to complete. However, I've been running the random wipe for at least 8 hours now and I don't know when it's going to complete. I'm not in a rush to have it done so I'll let it run for another 24 hours if I have to.