How do I identify the partitions of my hard drive in order to then shred them all?
I need to safely format my hardrive. I booted from a usb key and I am planning to run the following command on the whole hard drive:
sudo shred -v -n3 -z /dev/the-partition
My question is: how do I identify all the partitions that there are in order to totally wipe out the hard drive?
Here's the output of lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop0 7:0 0 1.8G 1 loop /rofs
loop1 7:1 0 91M 1 loop /snap/core/6350
loop2 7:2 0 34.6M 1 loop /snap/gtk-common-themes/818
loop3 7:3 0 140.7M 1 loop /snap/gnome-3-26-1604/74
loop4 7:4 0 2.3M 1 loop /snap/gnome-calculator/260
loop5 7:5 0 13M 1 loop /snap/gnome-characters/139
loop6 7:6 0 14.5M 1 loop /snap/gnome-logs/45
loop7 7:7 0 3.7M 1 loop /snap/gnome-system-monitor/57
sda 8:0 1 7.5G 0 disk /cdrom
├─sda1 8:1 1 1.9G 0 part
└─sda2 8:2 1 2.4M 0 part
nvme0n1 259:0 0 238.5G 0 disk
and here's is df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev
tmpfs 786M 1.7M 785M 1% /run
/dev/sda 1.9G 1.9G 0 100% /cdrom
/dev/loop0 1.8G 1.8G 0 100% /rofs
/cow 3.9G 331M 3.6G 9% /
tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /tmp
tmpfs 786M 44K 786M 1% /run/user/999
/dev/loop1 91M 91M 0 100% /snap/core/6350
/dev/loop2 35M 35M 0 100% /snap/gtk-common-themes/818
/dev/loop3 141M 141M 0 100% /snap/gnome-3-26-1604/74
/dev/loop4 2.3M 2.3M 0 100% /snap/gnome-calculator/260
/dev/loop5 13M 13M 0 100% /snap/gnome-characters/139
/dev/loop6 15M 15M 0 100% /snap/gnome-logs/45
/dev/loop7 3.8M 3.8M 0 100% /snap/gnome-system-monitor/57
Solution 1:
Why not shred then entire device (important! choose the right device to shred!):
shred /dev/nvme0n1
... rather than
shred /dev/nvme0n1p1
Solution 2:
I like lsblk, it show device name and partition inside it, as well the mounted partition.
:~$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 465,8G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 100M 0 part
├─sda2 8:2 0 122G 0 part
├─sda3 8:3 0 1K 0 part
├─sda5 8:5 0 7,6G 0 part [SWAP]
├─sda6 8:6 0 69,9G 0 part /
└─sda7 8:7 0 266,2G 0 part /home
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
sudo fdisk -l gives more detail, but it requires superuser access.
~$ sudo fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 465,8 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xe0ec1799
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 * 2048 206847 204800 100M 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2 206848 255999999 255793152 122G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 256002046 976771071 720769026 343,7G 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 256002048 272001023 15998976 7,6G 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 272003072 418486271 146483200 69,9G 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 418488320 976771071 558282752 266,2G 83 Linux
I always uses lsblk to detect the drive, then register /dev/zero to wipe the disk.