GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 651760
write zeros over disk/partition
Last modified: 2012-07-28 21:31:36 UTC
Can we please have an option to write zeros over a disk or a partition. I do this fairly a lot using dd and it would be nice to have a GUI for it.
Somehow a duplicate of https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=648988
Thanks for your bug report. A similar bug has been filed at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=648988 with more details, and proposing a choice between filling partitions with random data and plain zeros. Marking this bug as a duplicate, feel free to reopen it if you feel it is a different issue. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 648988 ***
(In reply to comment #2) > Marking this bug as a duplicate, feel free to reopen it if you feel it is a > different issue. Yes, I think this is a different issue. The use case here is when you are trashing or selling an old disk and want to make sure no data is left on it.
Like an "Overwrite drive" checkbox in the "Format Drive" dialog? If the mechanism described in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=648988 gets implemented, you'd have to Format, Create a new partition on the whole disk, check "overwrite partition", and then maybe erase that partition - not necessarily because it would be unreadable by the buyer anyway. Same effect. Maybe having this checkbox on both dialogs would make this redundant, and some users will check both, and spend twice as much time overwriting their disk. Or maybe not. OR overwriting disks for privacy when giving a drive away could be left to another program, like bleachbit (http://bleachbit.sourceforge.net/) or srm/nautilus-wipe (http://wipetools.tuxfamily.org/nautilus-wipe.html). Overwriting drives when encrypting them is needed anyway. What do you think? Thanks for your feedback
We now support this - there's an Erase combo box and appropriate warnings. We even support ATA Secure Erase for ATA hard disks http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gnome-disks-erase-overwrite-option.png http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gnome-disks-ata-secure-erase.png http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gnome-disks-ata-secure-erase-warning.png http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gnome-disks-ata-secure-erase-progress.png Also, if creating an encrypted volume we zero the cleartext device now http://cgit.freedesktop.org/udisks/commit/?id=6e15709374d1486af0c4ce2908176875e539ac83
Great, thank you!