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I was looking for a comparatively fast way to securely delete a hard drive I intend to sell and I found this in a German Ubuntu wiki:

wipe -q -Q 1 -R /dev/zero -S r -r $PATH

It said that according to contemporary research this would suffice. Is that true? Because it was done in one second:

arno@arno-X55A:~$ sudo wipe -q -Q 1 -R /dev/zero -S r -r /dev/sdb
Okay to WIPE 1 special file ? (Yes/No) Yes
Renaming                         /dev/sdb ->                         /dev/u8jSynOperation finished.
0 files wiped and 1 special file ignored in 0 directories, 0 symlinks removed but not followed, 0 errors occured.

Using the standard wipe command resulted in an ETA of 2 years for my 2 tb hdd.

Flimm
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H3R3T1K
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  • The -Q 1 tells it to do 1 pass. Default is 4 and more passes is better ;) If you drop the -q too it should do 34 passes (8 of those are random). – Rinzwind Apr 13 '13 at 11:49
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    http://askubuntu.com/questions/17640/how-can-i-securely-erase-a-hard-drive – Rinzwind Apr 13 '13 at 12:09
  • The guy in the post says it took him 20min for a 4 gb drive using shred. That would be 167 HOURS for me 2 tb drive. That is a little to long... The point here is to find a comparatively quick solution for large drives. – H3R3T1K Apr 13 '13 at 13:04
  • shred is not the one you want (you can recover from shred if I read the bottom answer correctly). see the wipe answer. That should do it (not slow either though but the amount of passes is crucial. Try with 2, 4, 8 and see how long it takes) ;) – Rinzwind Apr 13 '13 at 13:05

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If you look at the output of the command you ran, you can see that the wipe command did not in fact do anything, it ignored the hard disk:

0 files wiped and 1 special file ignored in 0 directories, 0 symlinks removed but not followed, 0 errors occured.

The man page for wipe indicates that this is the way to delete entire disks by specifying a special file:

wipe -kqD /dev/sdb

-k indicates that the file /dev/sdb should be kept and that wipe shouldn't attempt to delete it. -q means that wipe will make four passes (considered quick). -D means follow symlinks if /dev/sdb happens to be a symlink.

You can add the other options mentioned in your question, but I think -k would be essential for a special file.

If that still doesn't work, have a look at this question for other methods: How can I securely erase a hard drive?

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Flimm
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  • Thank you! Can you tell me what a symlink is? – H3R3T1K Apr 14 '13 at 10:17
  • OK it's been running a few hours and I have an ETA of 11 weeks. There must be something quicker. There wasn't any sensitive data on the device. I just don't want some curious user to dig up anything that doesn't concern him. It doesn't have to stand up to a forensic lab. Isn't there anything quicker? And please rename the title to "quick way of securely erasing large drives" or something. – H3R3T1K Apr 14 '13 at 15:19
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    @Arno: then open pass should be sufficient: wipe -kD -Q 1 /dev/sdb. If you don't care about security at all, you can delete all the partitions using a tool like Gparted, which will take less than a minute. – Flimm Apr 15 '13 at 08:40