Wipe a Hard Drive Using Kali Linux

shred is not listed in the Kali Linux tools listing, but it is available, when doing live boot.

This great tool can be used to reset a hard drive and do continuous overwrites so it cannot be restored.

You do not even have to mount the device you want to wipe.

sudo shred -vfz -n 10 /dev/sda

• -v means verbose, showing progress
• -f means change permissions to allow writing if necessary
• -z add a final overwrite with zeros to hide shredding
• -n overwrite N times instead of the default (3)

My example overwrites the Windows partitions 10 times.

Alternatively you can do it from Windows, but doing from Kali Linux surely feels good.

Resources and References

1. Computerhope: shred
2. Howtoforge: How to Securely Destroy/Wipe Data on Hard Drives with shred on Linux
3. Microsoft: how can i wipe out a hard drive in windows 7?