Cfxtrjtrk

I am brand new to this and just need to completely wipe the hdd for a fresh Ubuntu install. The live cd is mounted and I'm in the terminal window. 'wipe' did not work but gparted seems to be there. the 'gparted' install command shows, 'gparted is already the newest version (0.25.0-1).

Any help is appreciated.

Wipe and gparted are separate programs. You can install wipe using this command.

sudo apt install wipe

If you don't have internet you can do it manually using dd.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=100M 

instead of /dev/sda type your hard drive file which is in this format:

/dev/sdx 

and specify bs according to your ram.

If you mean "Format" or "remove all partitions" or "Format to unpartitioned" or anything of the sort.

Live CDs come prepacked with Gparted.

Open the start menu and type "gp", "Gparted" will show up, hit Enter or click on it and using that tool you'll be able to easily format or do whatever other disk operations you want to do.

for example :

Once you've selected the right drive with the drop down menu (by defaul the usb will be last in the list or not show up, so do not worry about that)

then "Partition" -> "Create partition table"

Remember you click the chack mark "apply" otherwise it does not apply.

this will give you a clean slate.

That being said if the whole point of this is to install ubuntu afterwards this is pointless. you can just start installing ubuntu straight away and when you get to the choice of install type (side by side, replace,re-install) just choose "something else" it opens up what is basically gparted but a version of gparted that is focused to creating the right partitions for booting ubuntu.

You'll need a 500Mb EFI partion first and the rest as an ext4 partion where / is mounted the rest of the paramaters should just remain defaults.

With such a setup, conditions for installing will be met and the installer will allow you to proceed. It works really well.

Open Disks by pressing the Dash button (or in the apps button, bottom left, on 18.04+) and typing it in. You can select the proper disk, and then press the menu button on that disk in the top right of the window. Click format, and then select "Overwrite (Slow)" and format. BE CAREFUL with formatting drives, especially securely, as you cannot recover the data afterwards and you need to be extra certain you've selected the correct one. If it's not impossible, I'd even go so far as to shut down, unplug important non-targeted drives and then start up, so I couldn't accidentally or otherwise delete data from them. Of course, just double checking should work too ;)