Running shred from live Knoppix 7.2 and I want to know if I can stop 'shred' before it's finished without hurt anything? At 50% after 4 days or so. Homebuilt AMD fusion with [Biostar TA75M] ST-1GB and 8gb pc1300 default settings. PC was acting a little goofy at times and dvd made alot of noise installing Linux and installs seemed a little goofy.
I got confused about partition/s/ing and wanted to wipe whole drive but after started wipe realized the following.
Turns out it had a 512MB sda1 32bit fat; assumed to be eUFI/ 932GB ext4/ and 8gb swap. I did check the BIOS for eUFI settings to turn off before acting but didn't find them.
I posted on Knoppix Forum 3 days ago no reply yet.
Have a similar build with Gigabyte MB and changing eUFI from AUTO to DISABLED made it run better. I read that shred isn't that effective on journaling fs but just want to be sure no hurty if I stop shred mid way? Didn't see a knoppix tag on this site but finally thought what the heck couldn't hurt.
Might need to know how to disable eUFI on Biostar and remove partitions to use whole drive also.... Thanx %)SW

Assuming the 'shred' you're running is the program that:
My best guess would be 'no'. If it were me, after I killed the shred process I'd run an fsck on the drive.

I won't claim to be an expert though, so waiting for others here to confirm is a good option.

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Thanx AA! I think your assumption is correct, it's suppose to write randon data 100 passes etc. or however one chooses in settings.
I too was thinking it should be no big deal but cannot afford to lose the drive [Mine and Murphy's luck]. It's 55% now should be done mid next week. Better safe than sorry. Dementia has the best of me at times but I keep plugging. 1TB lot of acreage. I thought it[shred] would get the whole drive but that eUFI must be stronger. Damn Micro$lut monoplea!!! I just couldn't find the setting in BIOS to turn it off as easily as I did on Gigabyte board.

The best software has 'protection' built in. I'm not an experienced developer, but I tend to think that a user breaking out of the process prematurely is something the developers would anticipate and put safeguards into the code.

But one can never be 100% certain and it sounds like in your case it won't pose a problem to wait for the other 45%.