ShredOS is a USB bootable (BIOS or UEFI) small Linux distribution with the sole purpose of securely erasing the entire contents of your disks using the program nwipe. If you are familiar with dwipe from DBAN then you will feel right at home with ShredOS and nwipe. For use in the home lab, I recommend to set up PXE boot and always have it on hand for any PC/Server that needs to be wiped.

As I'm rebuilding my lab, there is. a number of servers and a larger number of disks to get rid of. As some of my servers were used for real work, not just home lab play, they need to be thoroughly erased. Doing it one by one is not an option.

ShredOS is by far the easiest way to get nwipe up and running. It has support for autogenerated PDF reports, great for corporate users who need a paper trail. It has a simple config file, so you could even turn it into an auto nuke boot disk. Or change any other defaults to follow your corporate/industry specific needs.
To users of dban, this will present a huge leap forward.

Using ShredOS

Because ShredOS boots and runs straight from a USB flash drive or DVD/CD, it doesn't matter what operating system already exists on the computer. It will remove all data/directories/operating systems, from the drive or drives you have selected for wiping, leaving a disk with no trace of what originally existed. It will wipe PCs & Intel-based Macs. Likewise, it doesn't care what operating system previously existed.

Download and put the ISO on your Ventoy or an iPXE drive and boot the machine with erasable disk, into ShredOS. After the boot process, you have the main window open. Select (use the space bar) drive/drives, select method m, and if needed p for PRNG stream, r for rounds, then start by hitting shift + s.
Select config settings by hitting c and quit the ShredOS by hitting Ctrl + C.

Documentation

Disk Erasure Report

For corporate users, ShredOS will generate the needed written documentation.

Wiping SSD's and NVMe's

For SSD’s things can be much simpler and faster, and you might not need to even write 0’s or 1’s to the SSD. Neither is it's recommended to overwrite a consumer SSD multiple times, as it may affect its lifespan.
You can either use specific erase software’s provided by SSD manufacturers like:

• Western Digital – Kitfox, Windows only, download link
• Samsung – SSD Magician, Windows and macOS, download link
• Kingston – SSD Manager, Windows only, download link
• Crucial – SSD Storage Executive, Windows only, download link

If you don’t have a manufacturer software or don’t trust it, then you can use programs like NVMe-CLI which most SSD supports and use sanitize command for secure erase. NVMe-CLI can be used right from ShredOS CLI itself.

Using nvme-cli

Links to: NVMe-CLI man page, NVMe sanitize man page, NVMe format man page

nvme sanitize -a 2 /dev/nvme0n1

or

nvme format /dev/nvme0 -s 2 -n 1

or if nvme-cli is not supported, use blkdiscard see the man page

blkdiscard /dev/nvme0n1

Any option among crypto erase, block erase or secure erase should be sufficient and safe.

TL;DR

More details and explanations.

Nwipe

nwipe is a program that will securely erase the entire contents of disks. It can wipe a single drive or multiple disks simultaneously. It can operate as both a command line tool without a GUI or with a ncurses GUI.

Advantages of nwipe vs dwipe/DBAN

DBAN development stopped in 2015 which means it has not received any further bug fixes or support for new hardware since that date.

Nwipe originally was a fork of dwipe but has continued to have improvements and bug fixes and is now available in many Linux distros.

Wiping methods

You can select from a variety of recognized secure erase methods, which include:

• Fill With Zeros – Fills the device with zeros (0x00), one round only.
• Fill With Ones – Fills the device with ones (0xFF), one round only.
• Verify Zeros – This method only reads the device and checks that it is filled with zeros (0x00).
• Verify Ones –This method only reads the device and checks that it is filled with ones (0xFF).
• RCMP TSSIT OPS-II - Royal Canadian Mounted Police Technical Security Standard, OPS-II
• DoD Short - The US Department of Defense 5220.22-M short 3 pass wipe, uses passes 1, 2 and 7.
• DoD 5220.22M - The US Department of Defense 5220.22-M full 7 pass wipe. A full DoD 5220.22-M wiping may last up to two days or more for a large HDD drive.
• Gutmann Wipe - Peter Gutmann's method (Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory). It mentions it could be used for SSDs, but it's a 35 times wipe, so do not use on consumer disks.
• PRNG Stream - Fills the device with a stream from the PRNG. Meaning fill with random stuff.
• HMG IS5 enhanced - Secure Sanitization of Protectively Marked Information or Sensitive Information

nwipe also includes the following pseudo random number generators (prng):

• Mersenne Twister
• ISAAC
• In addition to the above, the following prngs are available in v0.37 and later
  • XORoshiro-256
  • Lagged Fibonacci
  • AES-CTR (OpenSSL)

nwipe Prerequisites

nwipe requires the following libraries to be installed:

• ncurses, pthreads, parted, libconfig

nwipe also requires the following program to be installed, it will abort with a warning if not found:

• hdparm – nwipe requires the hdparm to be installed, it will abort with a warning if not found. hdparm provides some of the information regarding disk size in sectors as related to the Host Protected Area (HPA) and Device Configuration Overlay (DCO).

nwipe do however have its own function that directly access the DCO to obtain the 'real max sectors' so reliance on 'hdparm' may be removed at a future date.

And optionally, but highly recommended, the following programs:

• dmidecode
  provides SMBIOS/DMI host data to stdout or the log file. If you don't install it, you won't see the SMBIOS/DMI host data at the beginning of nwipes log.
• readlink
• smartmontools
  smartmontools obtains serial number information for supported USB to IDE/SATA adapters. Without it, drives plugged into USB ports will not show serial number information.

Install nwipe on Debian/Ubuntu

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install build-essential pkg-config automake libncurses5-dev autotools-dev libparted-dev libconfig-dev libconfig++-dev dmidecode coreutils smartmontools hdparm

References

ShredOS ^[1] nwipe^[2] post on PXE boot ^[3]
dmidecode ^[4] readlink ^[5] smartmontools ^[6]