re-initialise drive

Hi, Troubleshooter.exe in dos have this function that alows to re-initialise a harddisk that can no longer be touched by partition magic and fisk in dos as well as fdisk in linux. If I understand it correctly it zero's out partition table and the whole disk. On a 80Gig drive this takes whole night. For the disk . it is something like throw it away. In the past I was able to re-use such drives and still uses them after this operation. Now all the partition utilities is happy to touch it again. Does such a utility exist in linux. Kindly please may I then have the name. Thanks -- Johan Sch Registered Linux User #330034 May this be a good day for learning