Lubuntu#
My current landlord has two old laptops - both were running Windows - more specifically Windows 7 and Windows 10 - I was tasked with wiping the hard drives on it, but sadly the Acer Aspire 5750G from 2011 is just too slow to operate. It took me almost 30 seconds just to open Firefox. So instead of wasting my time with long loading times on Windows 10, I decided to flash Lubuntu 24.04 to my USB stick and run it on the laptop.
What a day and night difference! The Lubuntu live session is extremely snappy and Firefox opens in 1 second. Now, it’s not as fast as my ASUS TUF laptop, but it’s a significant difference from Windows. The poor performance is likely not just because of Windows, maybe there were also other programs on it, but eitherway Lubuntu works great and makes this old device usable and with Linux, one can theoretically do everything with this laptop.
GNU Shred#
A really useful GNU tool installed on Linux is shred, it’s essentially a command that makes sure a file, partition or a whole storage device. I simply opened the terminal, checked the name of the hard drive with windows on it and ran as specified in a freeCodeCamp article:
sudo shred -vfz /dev/sde
Bam after a long time, everything was overwritten multiple times with random sequences of 1’s and 0’s and then finally with just 0’s - making any kind of data recovery impossible.
Actually according to Data Rescue Labs Inc. you only really need to wipe your drive once and not 7 times as it used to be the case in the 1970s and 1980s.
The same is confirmed by this You Only Need to Wipe a Disk Once to Securely Erase It.
This also lead me to this interesting video on how Hard drives work in the first place.
After everything was done I tried, just for the fun of it, to reboot Windows and as expected… it just wasn’t there anymore. I had successfully wiped the disk clean 🧹🧼✨.
The dangers of GNU Shred and Lubuntu live sessions#
Yikes, I find live sessions (basically running Linux from USB sticks) to be incredibly dangerous. On almost every computer a malicious person could insert a USB stick with Lubuntu on it into your computer, restart it, hold Escape, F3, F5, F8 and/or F12 to get into the BIOS without knowing your password, launch Lubuntu and then run GNU Shred - yes the shredding process takes some time, but then all your data, programs and even your operating system would be unrecoverably gone, but even if a small portion of your drive gets shredded your data might be completely corrupted and you wouldn’t be able to boot into your operating system (as critical data would be missing). This is a big security risk that every computer with an unlocked BIOS faces! ⚠️
