Use an Ubuntu Live CD to Wipe Any Harddrive

Wipe entire hard drives

If you’re disposing of an old hard drive, or giving it to someone else, then you might instead want to wipe your entire hard drive. shred can be invoked on hard drives, but on modern file systems, the shred process may be reversible. We’ll use the program wipe to securely delete all of the data on a hard drive.

Unlike shred, wipe is not included in Ubuntu by default, so we have to install it. Open up the Synaptic Package Manager by clicking on System in the top-left corner of the screen, then expanding the Administration folder and clicking on Synaptic Package Manager.

wipe is part of the Universe repository, which is not enabled by default. We’ll enable it by clicking on Settings > Repositories in the Synaptic Package Manager window.

Check the checkbox next to “Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)”. Click Close.

You’ll need to reload Synaptic’s package list. Click on the Reload button in the main Synaptic Package Manager window.

Once the package list has been reloaded, the text over the search field will change to “Rebuilding search index”.

Wait until it reads “Quick search,” and then type “wipe” into the search field. The wipe package should come up, along with some other packages that perform similar functions.

Click on the checkbox to the left of the label “wipe” and select “Mark for Installation”.

Click on the Apply button to start the installation process. Click the Apply button on the Summary window that pops up.

Once the installation is done, click the Close button and close the Synaptic Package Manager window.

Open a terminal window by clicking on Applications in the top-left of the screen, then Accessories > Terminal.

You need to figure our the correct hard drive to wipe. If you wipe the wrong hard drive, that data will not be recoverable, so exercise caution!

In the terminal window, type in:

sudo fdisk -l

A list of your hard drives will show up. A few factors will help you identify the right hard drive. One is the file system, found in the System column of the list – Windows hard drives are usually formatted as NTFS (which shows up as HPFS/NTFS). Another good identifier is the size of the hard drive, which appears after its identifier (highlighted in the following screenshot).

In our case, the hard drive we want to wipe is only around 1 GB large, and is formatted as NTFS. We make a note of the label found under the the Device column heading. If you have multiple partitions on this hard drive, then there will be more than one device in this list.

The wipe developers recommend wiping each partition separately.

To start the wiping process, type the following into the terminal:

sudo wipe <device label>

In our case, this is:

sudo wipe /dev/sda1

Again, exercise caution – this is the point of no return!

Your hard drive will be completely wiped. It may take some time to complete, depending on the size of the drive you’re wiping.

Conclusion

If you have sensitive information on your hard drive – and chances are you probably do – then it’s a good idea to securely delete sensitive files before you give away or dispose of your hard drive. The most secure way to delete your data is with a few swings of a hammer, but shred and wipe from a Ubuntu Live CD is a good alternative!

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Tags: delete format hard drive linux livecd shred ubuntu Ubuntu Tips & Tweaks wipe