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I'm looking for an easy way to securely wipe the SSD of my Ubuntu machine. As I'm using a fairly new Dell XPS 13 and am quite a noob with Ubuntu I don't want to use any fancy commands, that might brick my machine.

This is why I thought I could just re-install Ubuntu, this time with encryption, fill up the internal SSD, and re-install a clean version of Ubuntu after this.

Theoretically this should leave no data behind, is this correct?

question14394
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    Don't use homebrew methods. Use methods that are designed to do that. –  Mar 09 '21 at 21:27

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This might work, but there is a much easier way to wipe your hard drive clean:

Boot the computer from a Ubuntu live bootable USB. When it prompts you with the options to 'Run Ubuntu' or 'Install Ubuntu', choose 'Run Ubuntu'.

When Ubuntu loads, open the command prompt, then do sudo fdisk -l to find the location of the SSD in the file system (it will likely be /dev/sda). Then, use the following dd command to fill the SSD with zeroes:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4M status=progress

(assuming your SSD is /dev/sda - otherwise, change accordingly)

mti2935
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  • This is not guaranteed to do anything useful, especially on an SSD. The SSD likely has more internal storage than it exposes for wear leveling, so you cannot reliably overwrite its contents. – amon Mar 10 '21 at 19:17