Shredos

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. What are the advantages of nwipe over dwipe/DBAN? Well as everybody probably knows, 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. ShredOS hopefully will always provide the latest nwipe on a up to date Linux kernel so it will support modern hardware.

ShredOS supports either 32bit or 64bit processors. You will need to download the appropriate 64bit or 32bit .img or .iso file, depending upon your target processor and whether you want to burn ShredOS to a USB memory stick, in which case you would download the .img file. Alternatively, if you wanted to burn ShredOS to CD/DVD, then you would download the .iso file.

ShredOS can be used as a software image and booted from PXE capable systems from a PXE server.

You can also use ShredOS on headless systems or systems with faulty display hardware as it includes a user enabled telnet server. Further details can be found here. How to wipe drives on headless systems or systems with faulty or missing display hardware or keyboards

ShredOS includes the latest Nwipe official release, but in addition includes other disc related utilities such as Smartmontools, hdparm, a hexeditor hexedit, and, the program loadkeys which can be used for setting the keyboard layout. Nwipe automatically starts it's GUI in the first virtual terminal (ALT-F1), hdparm, smartmontools and hexeditor can be run in the second virtual terminal, (ALT-F2). Nwipe will erase drives using a user selectable choice of seven methods. hdparm - amongst many of its options - can be used for wiping a drive by issueing ATA erase commands to the drive's internal firmware. This is a planned feature addition to nwipe.

ShredOS boots very quickly and depending upon the host system can boot in as little as 2 seconds (typically 4 to 6 seconds) on modern hardware, while on an old Pentium4 may take 40+ seconds. Nwipe automatically starts in GUI mode and will list the disks present on the host system. In fact, Nwipe can launch so fast that the USB devices have not yet initialised so the first time nwipe appears it may not show any USB drives. If you then use Control-C to exit and restart nwipe, you should now see any attached USB devices. You can then select the methods by which you want to securely erase the disk/s. Nwipe is able to simultanuosly wipe multiple disks using a threaded software architecture. I have simultaneously wiped 28 loop devices in tests and know of instances where it's been used to wipe upwards of 10 drives on a system.