Ubuntu – GUI tool to securely overwrite whole hard drive

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My friend has a Windows laptop that we want to totally wipe and then turn over to a hardware technician (whom we don't trust with the data on the hard drive.) I want to securely wipe, rather than encrypt the drive.

I'll boot Ubuntu from a pendrive. However, we would like to use a GUI solution. I've searched this site for that, but couldn't find what I was looking for.

Any suggestions?

Best Answer

March 30 Edit:

By looking at this question it turns out there exists a GUI front-end to dd called GDiskDump.

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Installation is fairly simple ( steps i followed myself ):

  1. sudo apt-get install git
  2. git clone https://github.com/screenfreeze/gdiskdump.git
  3. cd gdiskdump/deb/ && sudo dpkg -i *.deb ; you likely just want dpkg -i gdiskdump_0.8-1_all.deb

After the deb package has been installed and configured , run by calling sudo gdiskdump. Note , as every other disk utility , this one requires root privillege

Original post

You could overwrite your disk with zeros multiple times using dd command 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/XdY bs=1M && zenity --into --text="DONE"

where X and Y denominate the path to the device file of your drive (use lsblk to find out which one it is). Note, the dd commands takes a long time.

Alternatively you can perform the shred command:

shred -vfz -n 10 /dev/sdX

Note: here, the number of iterations is 10 which may be a bit of an overkill. Refer to man shred for the meaning of each flag.

The closest tool for erasing a drive I found so far would be nwipe, which uses ncurses and which you can install using sudo apt-get install nwipe.

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