Hi folks,

It's been a while since I used the last free edition of PartedMagic in
the past. But now I had contact with this utility again. I wanted to de-
lete a HDD for a friend of mine and I figured out, that the version of
(the included) gParted was to old to delete partitions (gpt).

Problem solved - a newer version of gParted finally found the
partitions. What I miss, is the PartedMagic-addon "Erase Disk", since
it has a GUI.

Does anybody know where I can dl this program for future use?

I miss it, 'cause it uses dd to wipe disks and has a GUI and without a
GUI I'm lost.

TIA - Marc

MMB wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> It's been a while since I used the last free edition of PartedMagic in
> the past. But now I had contact with this utility again. I wanted to de-
> lete a HDD for a friend of mine and I figured out, that the version of
> (the included) gParted was to old to delete partitions (gpt).
>
> Problem solved - a newer version of gParted finally found the
> partitions. What I miss, is the PartedMagic-addon "Erase Disk", since
> it has a GUI.
>
> Does anybody know where I can dl this program for future use?
>
> I miss it, 'cause it uses dd to wipe disks and has a GUI and without a
> GUI I'm lost.
>
> TIA - Marc

Is using "dd" really that hard ?

I used it just yesterday.

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

That will basically erase SDA.

To use it yesterday, I used my Linux Mint 18.3 USB stick
and booted from the USB stick.

gnome-disks # Double check the disk identifier,
# that it is "/dev/sda"
# Don't be erasing the USB stick...
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

To make it go faster, this will be appropriate for
a lot of modern disks.

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=8192

You can control-c this at any time, and start
over again later if you want. Or even, reboot
the machine if it won't stop.

There is no longer a "low level format" on modern
drives. If you stopped an LLF in progress on the
drives 30 years ago, the drive would be toast!
Today, the drives are much better, because there
is no LLF, and only read() or write() as commands.
And writing can be stopped at any time (such as
on power fail or reboot).

Paul

MMB wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> It's been a while since I used the last free edition of PartedMagic in
> the past. But now I had contact with this utility again. I wanted to de-
> lete a HDD for a friend of mine and I figured out, that the version of
> (the included) gParted was to old to delete partitions (gpt).
>
> Problem solved - a newer version of gParted finally found the
> partitions. What I miss, is the PartedMagic-addon "Erase Disk", since
> it has a GUI.
>
> Does anybody know where I can dl this program for future use?
>
> I miss it, 'cause it uses dd to wipe disks and has a GUI and without a
> GUI I'm lost.
>
> TIA - Marc

nwipe
https://github.com/martijnvanbrummelen/nwipe

"nwipe is a program that will securely erase the entire contents of
disks. It can operate as both a command line tool without a GUI or with
a ncurses GUI as shown in the example below. It can wipe a single drive
or multiple disks simultaneously. Nwipe can be found in many Linux
distro repositories and the latest version of nwipe is available as a
Bootable USB flash image from here."

"nwipe is included with partedmagic, SystemRescueCD, gparted live and
ShredOS/ShredOS 2020"

shredos.x86_64
https://github.com/PartialVolume/shredos.x86_64

"ShredOS is a USB bootable (BIOS or UEFI) small linux distribution with
the sole purpose of securely erasing the entire contents of your disks
using the program nwipe."

Securely wipe disk - ArchWiki
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Securely_wipe_disk