nwipe is a fork of the dwipe command originally used by Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN). nwipe was created out of a need to run the DBAN dwipe command outside of DBAN, in order to allow its use with any host distribution, thus giving better hardware support.
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 as shown in the example below:
Note! Nwipe does not currently support HDA (hidden disc area) detection. You will need to run hdparm to detect and if necessary correct the reported size of the disc prior to using nwipe.
<i>GIF showing six drives being simultaneously erased. It skips to the completion of all six wipes and shows five drives that were successfully erased and one drive that failed due to an I/O error. The drive that failed would then normally be physically destroyed. The five drives that were successfully wiped with zero errors or failures can then be redeployed.</i>
nwipe is also included in [ShredOS](https://github.com/PartialVolume/shredos.x86_64) which was developed in particular to showcase nwipe as a fast-to-boot standalone method similar to DBAN. ShredOS always contains the latest nwipe version.
For a development setup, see the [Hacking section](#hacking) below. For a bootable version of the very latest nwipe master that you can write to an USB flash drive or CD/DVD, see the [Quick and easy bootable version of nwipe master section](#quick--easy-usb-bootable-version-of-nwipe-master-for-x86_64-systems) below.
Note. The following programs are optionally installed although recommended. 1. dmidecode 2. readlink 3. smartmontools.
#### dmidecode
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 determines the bus type, i.e. ATA, USB etc. Without it the --nousb option won't work and bus type information will be missing from nwipes selection and wipe windows. The coreutils package is often automatically installed as default in most if not all distros.
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.
If you want a quick and easy way to keep your copy of nwipe running the latest master release of nwipe see the [automating the download and compilation](#automating-the-download-and-compilation-process-for-debian-based-distros) section.
The `-O0 -g` flags disable optimisations. This is required if you're debugging with `gdb` in an IDE such as Kdevelop. With these optimisations enabled you won't be able to see the values of many variables in nwipe, not to mention the IDE won't step through the code properly.
Here's a script that will do just that! It will create a directory in your home folder called 'nwipe_master'. It installs all the libraries required to compile the software (build-essential) and all the libraries that nwipe requires (libparted etc). It downloads the latest master copy of nwipe from github. It then compiles the software and then runs the latest nwipe. It doesn't write over the version of nwipe that's installed in the repository (If you had nwipe already installed). To run the latest master version of nwipe manually you would run it like this `sudo ~/nwipe_master/nwipe/src/nwipe`
You can run the script multiple times; the first time it's run it will install all the libraries; subsequent times it will just say the libraries are up to date. As it always downloads a fresh copy of the nwipe master from Github, you can always stay up to date. Just run it to get the latest version of nwipe. It only takes 11 seconds to compile on my i7.
If you already have nwipe installed from the repository, you need to take care which version you are running. If you typed `nwipe` from any directory it will always run the original repository copy of nwipe. To run the latest nwipe you have to explicitly tell it where the new copy is, e.g in the directory `~/nwipe_master/nwipe/src`. That's why you would run it by typing `sudo ~/nwipe_master/nwipe/src/nwipe` alternatively you could cd to the directory and run it like this:
Note the ./, that means only look in the current directory for nwipe. if you forgot to type ./ the computer would run the older repository version of nwipe.
Once you have copied the script below into a file called buildnwipe, you need to give the file execute permissions `chmod +x buildnwipe` before you can run it. [Download script](
## Quick & Easy, USB bootable version of nwipe master for x86_64 systems.
If you want to just try out a bootable version of nwipe you can download [ShredOS](https://github.com/PartialVolume/shredos.x86_64). The ShredOS image is around 60MB and can be written to an USB flash drive in seconds, allowing you to boot straight into the latest version of nwipe. ShredOS is available for x86_64 (64-bit) and i686 (32-bit) CPU architectures and will boot both legacy BIOS and UEFI devices. It comes as .IMG (bootable USB flash drive image) or .ISO (for CD-R/DVD-R). Instructions and download can be found [here](https://github.com/PartialVolume/shredos.x86_64#obtaining-and-writing-shredos-to-a-usb-flash-drive-the-easy-way-).
