How can I format an encrypted hard drive in Ubuntu?

Question

some time ago, a laptop broke down. I managed to save the ram, the processor and the hard drive, that disk had a Window$ 10 installed and is encrypted by BIOS. Instead of throwing it, I would like to format it and put a casing to be able to use it as an external disk.

How could I do this? Thanks.

Solution

Assuming you have a computer that runs Ubuntu or an Ubuntu community flavour,

• an installed system,
• a live or persistent live system:

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If you wipe the first mibibyte, overwrite it with zeros, the data on the [rest of] the drive does not make any difference, and you can use any tool for this purpose.

• You can wipe the first mibibyte in a safe way with mkusb.

• After that you can [install and] use gparted or some command line tools to create the partition table with partitions and file systems that you want. It might even work without wiping the first mibibyte (depending of on the data in that part of the drive).

Links:

• mkusb
• mkusb/wipe
• GParted Manual

Comments

[EODCraft Staff]

What have you tryed? GPart is a good option. gparted.org/download.php

[Chai T. Rex]

If you don’t want to save any data on it, you can usually blank the disk with a Linux live CD and sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/…. Replace /dev/… with the disk’s device file, and make sure it’s the right disk or you’ll zap something else.

[louiesanchezdj]

Usually, I use the "discs" tool that comes by default in Ubuntu, but sometimes it fails to erase or format to a disk. I will try with what you have told me, and if not, I'll try it with gparted. Thanks.

[louiesanchezdj]

Now I use Kubuntu, I left Ubuntu because I did not like new gnome-shell customization. I also have another pc with Debian. I have been using Linux for more than five years. But I have not gotten serious with Linux until I started Debian a few months ago. I will test the solutions you have given me to see if I solve it. Thanks for the quick answers.

[sudodus]

@louiesanchezdj, This method should work with all current versions of Kubuntu (and I think also with Debian Jessie and Stretch). Good luck :-)