Ubuntu

How do I wipe my hard drive clean using this system?

Asked by jonathan todd

My computer is infected with viruses and trojan horses. A book I have seen tells me how to completely clean a hard drive,but it is for Windows XP. How do I clean my hard drive on my computer which runs on Ubuntu?

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Thomas Krüger (thkrueger) said : 		#1

At first: it is highly unlikely that Ubuntu has been effected with a viruses and / or trojan horses. Why do you think that happened?

But if you really feel the urge to clean everything from your hard drive you have many options (choose one):

- Reinstall from CD and choose "use entire disk" when being ask about the partition scheme.
- Boot from CD and ...
  * remove all partitions with gparted or fdisk (try "sudo fdisk /dev/sda")
  * overwrite the whole disk with zeros (try "sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512")
  * destroy the disks content securely (try "sudo shred /dev/sda")
...

I'd personally recommend to reinstall.

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Rajinder Sandhu (sandy744) said : 		#2

hold on .....before doing anything ... what are the messages you are getting for trojans and viruses... I still have a doubt that your ubuntu is infected.... may be... since windows are infected so you think it is also infected as it is a common hdd but that is not he case, anyway
 you can install AVAST it is available in Linux also, update its data base and scan/ clean your system.....

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