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Questions[disk-utility](ubuntu)

Martin Hope
Stefan van den Akker
Asked: 2013-10-16 11:25:01 +0800 CST
  • 44

I am planning on selling my laptop. So I formatted my disk using the Disk Utility and chose to overwrite the disk with zeroes.

Two questions:

Is this the same as overwriting the disk using dd?

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

And is this method secure enough so that buyers can't easily recover the previous data? Or should I take additional measures (like encrypting the disk, destroying the headers, etc.)?

disk-utility
Martin Hope
Peter
Asked: 2013-01-31 00:54:00 +0800 CST
  • 21

I'm trying to run gnome-disk-utility. But I cannot seem to find it.

sudo apt-get install gnome-disk-utility says its already installed, as does the software manager, however running gnome-disk-utility or palimpsest gets me command not found.

I have tried reinstalling it (sudo apt-get install --reinstall, and sudo apt-get remove ... sudo apt-get install), which does no good.

whereis: palimpsest return empty
whereis: gnome-disk-utility returns /usr/share/gnome-disk-utility, a folder which contains nothing but *.ui files

So, what has gone wrong, and how do I fix it?

disk-utility
Martin Hope
waspinator
Asked: 2012-06-26 16:26:28 +0800 CST
  • 9

When I plug in a external USB drive and want to check its S.M.A.R.T. status in Disk Utility (palimpsest) I cannot because the option is greyed out. Is there an option somewhere to enable this feature? It works fine for internal IDE/SATA drives.

I know the USB drive supports S.M.A.R.T. because I can use smartmontools and front end GSmartControl to get the information, but I'd rather not have to use use it since palimpsest is already installed by default.

Thanks

disk-utility
Martin Hope
Uli
Asked: 2011-08-01 03:01:21 +0800 CST
  • 9

I just bought a Lenovo x121e (E-350 version). I was able to successfully install ubuntu 11.04 and everything is running fine (for the system to boot an efi partition seems to be necessary however). The laptop has a Seagate Disk with a physical sector size of 4096 bytes.

After ubuntu is installed Disk Utility reports that my partitions are not properly aligned: screenshot

I have tried both fully automatic install wiping the disk (as shown on the screenshot) and setting the partions manually during install. Both variants show misaligned partitions.

  • Is this this a bug when creating the partitions or is Disk utility giving wrong information?
  • If the alignment is wrong and negatively affecting performance, how can I correct it (either now or with a fresh install)?
disk-utility