parted /dev/sdb mkpart primary fat32 1049K 15. # Now we know only 1 partition exists on /dev/sdb Parted Magic does not detect the SSD drive.
Gparted secure erase install#
I have a 2016 version of Parted Magic (10.18) and I've created a bootable USB as I wish to securely wipe/erase all partitions and sensitive company data from the SSD and install a new OS. It was also easy, from there to create new partitions, in a straight-forward way. I'm not so sure it is a Toshiba SSD but all searches have returned Toshiba. I found f3probe ( ) solved the problem of deleting all the partitions, quickly and easily, working with large capacity drives, and created exactly 1 partition spanning the whole drive, which was easy to delete.
Gparted secure erase software#
That deleted the partition but some partitioning software apparently found the partition backups automatically. I wanted to do the same thing (except in Slackware 14.2) but found I could not effect most of the solutions proposed here, with the most elaborate and well-documented solution creating new problems for making replacement partitions. (If you want to wipe the extended partition table, you'll need to know more about the operating system different operating systems do extended partitions in different ways.) The primary partition table within the MBR (so, not talking about GPT here) is located 446 bytes in, so we instruct dd to seek 446 bytes in before writing.Įxtended partitions are generally created by using a primary partition slot to point at the extended partition table, so if we erase the 4 primary partitions, we effectively wipe the extended partition table as well the OS won't be able to find it, so it won't be able to read and interpret it. Here, we tell dd to write 64 blocks (or bytes, because of our bs=1 parameter), since the primary partition table consists of 4 16-byte partition entries, for a total of 64 bytes. However, we need to address things more precisely than that, so we tell dd to use a block size of 1 byte.
![gparted secure erase gparted secure erase](https://techgage.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/GIGABYTE-Z77X-UP4-TH-EFI-Hotplug.jpg)
The default block size may be 512 bytes, 1024 bytes or 4096 bytes, depending on your system. If you see no output, just use dd: sudo dd if/dev/zero of/dev/sdX bs1M. (replace sdX with sda/sdb/sdc, whatever your disk is). First check if secure erase is supported: sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdX grep -i security. Securely erase specific files with Eraser If you need to delete only specific files and folders rather than entire drives, the open-source Eraser is the tool for you. Here, we specify which device we're writing to. Secure erase erases the drive at firmware level. Here, we specify that we're reading from /dev/zero, which is a special device which emits NUL bytes-zeros.
![gparted secure erase gparted secure erase](https://gparted.org/docs/gparted-live-manual/C/figures/gparted-live-after-bootup.png)
It's the simplest flexible tool for this job. This standard command copies bytes from a source and writes them to a destination. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ bs=1 count=64 seek=446 conv=notrunc If we're talking about MBR-style partitions.