how to format my hard drive when i do not have a disk

#HOW TO FORMAT MY HARD DRIVE WHEN I DO NOT HAVE A DISK INSTALL#

Beware that some parts of your disk will not be erased - use the drive firmware 'SECURE ERASE' command, such as via hdparm, to properly clean off a disk.Read the manpage for shred online or by typing man shred in the terminal.Apply the changes by click the Apply button (the green checkmark) in the toolbar. Then add a single partition that uses all of the unallocated space on the device, choosing fat32 as the file system. Then select Device -> Create partition table to create a partition table on the device.

#HOW TO FORMAT MY HARD DRIVE WHEN I DO NOT HAVE A DISK INSTALL#

The easiest way is to install GParted and use it: sudo apt-get install gpartedĬhoose your device in the upper-right corner list. sudo shred -v -n1 -z /dev/sdXĪfter this, you would have to repartition the device. You can also set all bits to zero after the last iteration by adding the option -z, I prefer to do this. This might take a while, depending on the size of your external hard drive (I think it takes twenty minutes or so for my 4 GB flash drive). You can add the option -n N to only do this N times, to save time on large capacity devices. This will overwrite all the blocks on the device with random data three times, the -v flag is for verbose and will print the current progress. Then run the following, replacing /dev/sdX with the name of your device: sudo shred -v /dev/sdX Unmount all currently mounted partitions on that device, if any. Make sure it is the correct device, picking the wrong device will wipe it. You can use sudo fdisk -l to list all connected storage devices, and find your external hard drive there. This might be something like /dev/sdb or /dev/hdb (but not like /dev/sdb1, that's a partition).

There's a command-line utility called shred, which overwrites data in a file or a whole device with random bits, making it nearly impossible to recover.įirst of all, you need to identify the name of the device.

How to format my hard drive when i do not have a disk