Question on shredding a terebyte drive

[Roger]

On 09/03/2009 07:34 AM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 02, 2009 at 13:32:32 -0700,
>    "Dean S. Messing"<deanm at sharplabs.com>  wrote:
>    
>> I have a terebyte sata drive that I need to securely wipe clean.  It
>>      
>
I've found over time that formatting with ext3 tends to remove most 
hidden partitions and data.
Formatting can be faster than trying to remove files.
with particularly troublesome drives I removed partitions with dos fdisk 
and created 1, formatted to dos 5 then did the same again with ext3.
The most troublesome took about 40 minutes to clean.
Is there a way to set up say 3 or 4 partitions of various sizes, format 
each to ext3 then remove the partitions and reformat.
Roger