Best Secure Delete Tool LINUX & LiveBoot
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The winner of my best rating of secure delete utility goes to nWipe (a fork of DBAN), and it runs perfectly. It is open-source and available for all Linux distros. The specs for this utility are fabulous.

The Wipe Methods include:
Zero Fill
RCMP TSSIT OPS-II
DoD Short
DoD 5220.22.M
Gutmann Wipe
PRNG Stream
Verify Blank
HMG ISS Enhanced

The Pseudo Random Number Generators have two options:

Mersenne Twister (mt19937ar-cok)
ISAAC (rand.c 20010626)

In my opinion the best option is using a pseudo random number generated wipe and your security level would be how many rounds of the PRNG you wipe the drive with. Then I'd do a zero wipe, then I'd verify that the zero wipe actually had replaced all the data with zeros. With the PRNG wipe it will successfully wipe the largest variety of drives without having a wipe custom to one particular drive and not all. PRNG is the way to go. For sensitive wipes I'd do 3 PRNG wipes with 1 ZERO wipe with one verification wipe. For classified stuff I'd do 7 PRNG wipes with 1 ZERO wipe and one verification wipe. Then you're good to go.

nwipe also gives statistics during the wipe:

runtime, remaining time, load averages, throughput, and a note on whether any errors were found during the wiping process, and it is displayed to the user of the software.

When comparing a free utility and works better than the commercial alternatives, its a fairly simple decision to go for the better and cheaper alternative. For Linux users it may be as simple as doing a "get" from the distro's software repository, and for those not well versed in Linux then you could buy Parted Magic, burn it on a flash USB drive, select "extra options" upon boot, select nwipe, and you're in the program. If you're still not understanding the process then get some teenage kid to do it for you, pay him $20 for his work (or free if its your kid), and it will be configured and run with its intuitive user interface. After several hours your drive will be wiped. You can expect an easy several hours if not most of a full day, as the hard drive sizes these days are wild and take a long time to securely delete everything.

I hope that this has been informative...

Cheers!
-warmfuzzy

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2023/04/30 (Linux/64)
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