You may need to wipe you hard drive to clean
up partition errors, bad installations, or for privacy. This will show you howto do this
These methods use a command called dd
Wiping the entire disk
This will overwrite all partitions, master boot records, and data.
Filling the disk with all zeros (This may take a while, as it is making every bit of data 0) :
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 (This is going to take even longer than the first example.) :
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=1M