Theoretically, what you need to do is write zeros to unused space. That is
easy to do with 'dd':

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda5 bs=512 count=30000

where "of" is the partition to be wiped and "count" is the number of
sequential disk sectors to write. However, that could destroy needed data on
that partition.

The problem is determining where that unused space is. Anybody know of a way
to do this?

You could make a backup of that partition, wipe the partition, and restore
the backup. 

This page might help: http://www.geocities.com/thestarman3/asm/mbr/WIPE.html

John Hebert

-----Original Message-----
From: Matthew Eastman
To: [email protected]
Sent: 7/14/03 10:47 AM
Subject: Re: [brlug-general] HD Free Space

Since I didn't clarify, the filesystem is ext3.

-- Matt Eastman

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