[...] Wrong. Windows long format does NOT wipe the disk, it just does the normal "quick" format, and then checks the disk for errors, taking a ton of time. [...] DoD wipe, lol. That's nonsense. Nobody has ever recovered any meaningful data from a modern disk overwritten with a single pass of zeroes. Even the best-case scenario for such things is poor. There is a prize for the first person to do so, and it has never been claimed. If you genuinely want to wipe it, just do one pass of NULs. Pretty trivial in any *nix adhering to POSIX: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/[block] bs=2M If you just want to reformat (has the appearance of wiping the disk, but doesn't actually remove data), then just do that. You don't need to wipe it.

long if u want to waste more time and wipe fully!

if u have had dodgy stuff on it, then u may want to do a dod format using gdisk or something.

Basically my computer has become full off kiddy porn over the years. Its becoming a bit full but i don't know which program I need/use so i was wondering what's the best way to wipe a computer? I wanna wipe it down to the OS or even better wipe it so i can put a clean OS installation on it. I want safe option obviously, nothing like running a magnet over it :D Thanks in advance.