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I have a Dell inspiron about a year old. It has a 32 GB solid state hard drive. I'm having problems with it that make it not worth the trouble to fix, unless, that is, if I can wipe Windows10 and all files completely from the SSD, absolutely clean, and then install ubuntu.

I have investigated numerous programs for cleaning hard drives but they are for standard mechanical hard drives, not solid state hard drives. I'm at the point where I'll toss this piece of equipment into the trash, except that if the problem has to do with windows itself, rather than the hardware, then I'd love to use this little laptop for my first experience with ubuntu.

stonefly
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    Write the Ubuntu ISO to a USB stick, boot to the USB stick. And when it asks, choose "Erase entire drive and install Ubuntu" or "Use entire disk" during the installation process. That will use the entire disk for installation. There's no need to do any specific type of disk wipe beforehand. – Thomas Ward Jul 05 '18 at 16:11
  • That sounds simple enough. I'll give it a go. Thank you, Thomas Ward. - stonefly – stonefly Jul 05 '18 at 16:18
  • The link immediately above explains all. When it asks if you want to install alongside Windows, instead tell it you want to Replace Windows, and all of the SSD will be used for Ubuntu. – K7AAY Jul 05 '18 at 18:11

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There are apps which can be used to completely wipe data, but they're superfluous.

Your PC will have two, or three, Windows partitions; an EFI partition (FAT32), the main partition (NTFS), and maybe a recovery partition (probably NTFS). If you are absolutely, positively, certain beyond the merest shadow of a doubt that you never want to use Win10 again on that box, then delete them all, and if I had your Service Tag number, I could probably find the Dell utility to do so.

However, you can use the perfectly good installer which Ubuntu provides to wipe them all. When the installer asks if you want to install alongside Windows, choose the last option, Choose something else.

The gparted app appears; select each of the partitions you see and mark them for deletion, then commit the changes and wipe them all. Then, back up, back into the Ubuntu system installer. Now, pick the first menu item and use the entire SSD for Ubuntu.

Ubuntu's default filesystem is ext4, and deleting the old NTFS filesystem(s) means all the data is effectively lost; as you overwrite it by installing and then using Ubuntu, all the old bits on the SSD will be overwritten, which erases the Windows apps and data beyond recovery.

If you are installing 18.04LTS, then there won't be a swap partition, but a swap file instead; that's AOK. Some older versions had a swap partition as the default.

K7AAY
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