shred a hard drive

http://maketecheasier.com/ubuntu-how-to-delete-your-files-or-wipe-your-hard-drive-beyond-recovery/2008/02/14

It might have been better for you to post here what the error messages were and to keep the drive. I use a USB Maxtor drive for my backups and that works very well.

> None of the available Ubuntu backup programs will backup to this drive.

This sounds extremely unlikely. (If the drive was not broken from the beginning)

Please be more specific what you exactly do and what happens.

Please run smartctl -a on your drive and post the results here. (Ask for more detailed instructions if google doesn't help you how to run smartctl)

if you use

sudo fdisk -l

you can identify the device and it will be named something like this (but may not be EXACTLY LIKE THIS)

/dev/sdb

you can use the zero device to write zeros to the drive. MAKE SURE YOU USE THE RIGHT DISK OR YOU *WILL* DAMAGE YOUR FILES. If you screw up it's NOT my fault

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb (following my example drive name earlier0

This will write sequential 0s to the drive until it reaches the end. all the partitions on the drive will need unmounting with:

sudo umount /dev/sdb1
sudo umount /dev/sdb2
.
.
etc

Notice that its UMOUNT and not UNMOUNT

This will wipe the drive pretty good. If you are super paranoid (tinfoil hat wearing type) there is a tool on the ultimatebootcd (free from www.ultimatebootcd.com) which will invert each bit on the drive SEVEN TIMES and is considered MoD standard. It will take AGES but will mean that even if you analyse the data with electron microscopes and oscilloscopes the data will be VERY hard to retrieve.