Incredibly Stupid Question

[markolbert]

I'm trying to run nwipe from within SystemRescueCD. It starts up fine, giving me an options page...and then when I press S, to start, nothing happens. No indication that anything is happening, no stats update, nothing.

What am I doing wrong?

[kelderek]

Two possibilities jump to mind: 1) Have you selected at least one disk to wipe with the space bar? It should say wipe in the brackets to the left of the disk name 2) Are you pressing capital S, i.e. shift+s ? A lowercase s does nothing. I assume that is to keep from accidentally starting a wipe

[kelderek]

BTW I took a look and it seems the current version of SystemRescueCD is using nwipe 0.21, which has some known issues and may not work properly for you. They are unrelated to your original issue, but if you get it to start wiping and the progress numbers don't make sense or it wipes a whole disk in seconds, your system is affected by the issue.
I tried to notify the SystemRescueCD people and request they update their version of nwipe, but their forum's registration is closed and SourceForge is apparently migrating data centers right now and is unavailable. If you have a forum account and can make the request, that would be great. For reference, my tool of choice is PartedMagic. It stopped being free a few years ago, but it is inexpensive. It has the current version of nwipe.

[garretwilson]

The Shift-S trick is a real gotcha. There is nothing to indicate the user should be pressing Shift. The other options work without shift, yet they look the same way in the UI.

Requiring Shift perhaps is a clever way to prevent a mistake. But it shouldn't be an "easter egg" that one must stumble upon—because "stumbling upon" is the thing it is meant to prevent.

There are several options:

• The other command keys could be shown in lowercase.
• All commands could require Shift.
• The UI could actually say Shift+S.

[kelderek]

I think that is a fair point about the GUI not differentiating. My preference is your first suggestion about lowercasing the options that don't require uppercase. As an addition, a dialog could be shown when lowercase s is pressed. It could strictly informational like "To avoid accidentally starting a wipe, you must type an uppercase S instead of a lowercase s." or interactive like "Start wiping?" with yes and no options, defaulting to no. In the case of the latter instance, you could still have uppercase S start the wipe without a prompt.

If I remember correctly, it used to be F10 to start a wipe. Maybe Martjin can explain why it was changed? Perhaps to be more friendly or to avoid issue with unusual keyboards/terminals.

[garretwilson]

or interactive like "Start wiping?" with yes and no options, defaulting to no. In the case of the latter instance, you could still have uppercase S start the wipe without a prompt.

Those are both great ideas. There would still need to be an indication somewhere that Shift+S was even an option.

[kelderek]

The notification could be in the dialog. Something like "Note: Pressing shift+s from the main screen will start the wipe without this confirmation"

[martijnvanbrummelen]

Will change options to lowercase and document shift S in documentation in the next release.