d-ban

[gnuuser]

this is a very useful tool
http://www.dban.org/about
D-ban is a small disk wiping distro written for the purpose of completely wiping a hdd
the iso is a little over 2 meg in size.
It uses the mersiene twister method of overwriting the drive in three passes(12 loops per pass) and one final pass to blank the drive.
while dban is making its final pass it verifies the disk and will tell you if there are any errors (if a drive is flagged with errors I do not even reuse it as it will have stability issues later).
if you wish to keep a log of the actions it gives you the option to save the log file on a floppy(but you need to download a program to display the info as it is in a dat format)
even then the log info is only the steps taken to wipe the drive, the drive sn. and notice of errors.

Ive burned it to a micro cd for use but im not sure of a way to burn it to a usb stick yet