GUI tool to securely overwrite whole hard drive

Question

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?

Paerhaps this might be useful: http://askubuntu.com/q/139474/57576 — andrew.46, Mar 25 '16 at 06:13
Also, this is about wiping the whole drive, not individual files. — Fiksdal, Mar 25 '16 at 06:15
@kos those answers are all CLI. This question is for a GUI option. — Fiksdal, Mar 25 '16 at 10:49
I know, removed already. Apparently there used to be a GUI frontend to `dd` (`gdiskdump`), but it's not in the repositories anymore. — kos, Mar 25 '16 at 10:52
I suppose it'd be redundant to remark that using `dd` would be rather easy and wouldn't require downloading additional software. Combined with `pv` one would also get a nice progress bar. — kos, Mar 25 '16 at 10:58
I suppose I agree. But this friend is an old man who will not take kindly to CLI. — Fiksdal, Mar 25 '16 at 11:10
@kos I did find github for gdiskdump . . . Hasn't been updated since 4 years ago though — Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy, Mar 30 '16 at 15:23

score 7 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:24

March 30 Edit:

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

Installation is fairly simple ( steps i followed myself ):

sudo apt-get install git
git clone https://github.com/screenfreeze/gdiskdump.git
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.

@Fiksdal not a lot of choices for GUI out there, so far I haven't seen any. You could put a GUI onto `dd` but that's essentially just "eye-candy" for what's already working without extra cr@p — Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy, Mar 25 '16 at 10:57
I suppose I agree. But this friend is an old man who will not take kindly to CLI. — Fiksdal, Mar 25 '16 at 11:12

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 25 '16 at 11:18

Both gparted and KDE Partition manager have (or had) secure erase options. They're buried in the menus, but they're there. One (I don't recall which, and I'm away from my home computer at the moment) actually has some options on how thoroughly you want the overwrite done.

Another, probably more versatile option, is to download a (paid) copy of Parted Magic. It's a complete OS (Linux based, of course) chock full of GUI disk management and repair tools, including a couple different secure erase options. The developer had to start charging for the distro a couple years ago, but if you want a real secure erase and aren't finding what you need in gparted or KDE Partition Manager, Parted Magic for certain includes it and is likely worth the (fairly low) cost.

GUI tool to securely overwrite whole hard drive

2 Answers2