We had a old Mac G3 OSX system with a PowerPC processor that we needed to zero fill the hard drive inorder to get it ready to be donated. At first we tried DBAN which is said to work well for non mac systems. They have a beta version for PowerPC. We tried both, but neither worked. You can download DBAN here and try it for yourself.
So after some searching online we came across an alternate way to Clean a Hard Drive (zero fill). using Linux. The discussion for this thread can be found here. I wanted to verify this with a different website since I wasn’t familar with this process.
Another application of /dev/zero is to “zero out” a file of a designated size for a special purpose, such as mounting a filesystem on a loopback device (see Example 13-8) or “securely” deleting a file (see Example 12-55).
Linux.com was able to explain what was going on a bit better than linuxquestions. We were satisfied. Next we needed was a live distro. We downloaded the PowerPC version of Ubuntu which allowed us to load a live version of Ubuntu and exit to the shell prompt. Once there we ran the command we got from linuxquestions.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1M
It seemed to work. Rebooting the machine verified that the MBR was overwritten. The ouput after the command had finished indicated that the entire drive had been filled. Not sure how long it took since we let it run overnight. Will have to use this process again if we ever have an older mac system to get rid of. DBAN will probably work on the newer macs.
http://www.loughborough.ac.uk/computing/policies/erase-mac.html
this is a safer way of doing it as you can still recover from a zeroed drive, depending on the number of passes. Some where at home (in a box no less) I have some cleaning scripts you can use once you get the system booted into *nix. The link is for the mac way though