How would you write 0's to a Hard Drive and when would this be necissary? Thanks?

You can download a zero disk utility from your hard drive's manufacturers website. Many times it is included in and part of their diagnostics program. When would you use it? I can think of two main reasons: 1. If you had important information on the hard drive at one time and you were going to sell it or give it away. Using the zero disk utility then would make it much less likely that someone could resurect the data. 2. On rare occasion normal partitioning software like fdisk or Partition Magic doesn't work when you want to delete and recreate partitions. Like sometimes it's hard to get rid of an old Linux partition. Then after the zero disk utility is run you will be able to recreate the partitions.

You obtain a program such as PC-CHECK which includes the facility to wipe a disc. I have never needed to do this myself, but the reason for doing so is to make sure sensitive data is completely removed. e.g. When you delete a file or folder, or reformat a disc, what happens is that the details are removed/changed in the hdd index tables but the information itself remains on the hdd until such time as that area is over-written. Good luck - keep us posted.

I have used the Samsung utility many times. Sometime a boot sector virus nails, or gets your Winsock32.DLL file, then I nuke the whole disk to reinstall. I have also seen a lot of totally screwed disks, usually when someone tries to install XP on a dirty disk, or, more often, someone totally screws the disk using Partition Magic. It's easier to just hose the whole disk and re-partition&reformat rather than spend hours trying to "fix it" and end up hosing the disk anyway. They can be real timesavers.

Everyone else has this one covered. Just to put my pennies worth in, the official term for this process of writing zeros is 'Binary Wipe'.