USB drives are majorly preferred and used by most people due to their high level of flexibility. For instance, they can be passed from one person to another in the form of gifts. The only thing which is required is that you will need to delete every data in order to ensure your privacy.
Just add or select the files/folders you want to erase from SanDisk USB flash drive, then click on 'Erase Now' button to permanently erase the selected files/folders from SanDisk USB flash drive. Wipe SanDisk USB flash drive. Wipe Hard Drive will help you permanently erase all data information on the SanDisk USB flash drive and format it. You can use a third-party wiping tool, AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, which can help you to enter PreOS mode to completely clean your hard drive including the operating system. And it owns several features to meet different needs. How to completely erase USB flash drive? If you are thinking how to permanently wipe out USB flash drive then do not worry you have come at right place. Here you will come to know about a tool which is famous as Remo MORE that can completely wipe USB flash drive data just within few simple steps. Right-click the USB drive you plan to wipe and select “Wipe Hard Drive”. Choose “Fill sectors with Zero” to wipe your USB drive, which is safe and quick. And click “Next” to continue. How To Completely Wipe PC & Connected Drives Using BitRaser Tool through Bootable USB - 5 Minutes Start wiping your laptop or desktop PC clean along with the connected storage drives, as follows: Step 1 Connect the bootable USB media to your host machine (laptop or desktop PC).
However, this isn’t so easy as you might think as there are times when you may not be able to wipe a USB drive. There is no need to panic as this post will be helping you out today.
When Would You Need to Wipe a USB Drive?
There are different scenarios that can require you to wipe data from a USB drive. Some of them are:
1. When more space is required for storing more data and files.
2. When you want to remove unknown virus from such USB drive.
3. When you want to get its file format system changed like from NTFS to Ext4 or exFAT.
4. When sensitive information needs to get deleted.
How to Permanently Wipe USB Drive?
Simple deletion or formatting can’t wipe data from USB drive completely. As data can be recovered easily in such case with the help of recovery software. However, there are solutions to erase USB drive thoroughly. We’ll explain in details below.
1Using In-built Format Option
The use of built-in format option can help you wipe your USB drive permanently. The process is simple to carry out by following the steps below:
Step 1: Get the USB drive inserted into your system. It should be detected within 1-2 seconds.
Step 2: Go to My Computer after which you will need to locate your USB flash drive. Once you have done that, right click on it.
Step 3: Locate the option which says 'Format' and click on it.
Step 4: An interface will pop up showing you details about your device. Locate the option which says 'Start' below and click on it. Just wait for some few minutes until the process is complete. It will display 'Format Successful' once it gets completed.
2Using the DiskPart Command Line Tool
In case you can’t seem to make use of the above method for one reason or the other, it is also possible to wipe USB drive permanently via the use of diskpart command line tool.
You can follow the steps outlined below in order to effectively perform this process.
Step 1: At your screen’s bottom-left, get the Windows button clicked on. Now, type in 'cmd' and click on 'Command Prompt' option that it will show you.
Step 2: Enter 'Diskpart command' to start.
Step 3: The program is going to load after which you will see “DISKPART>”.
Step 4: You will need to enter 'List Disk'. Through this, every device that is connected to your system will be listed. You can use the space of your USB drive to identify it. The USB drives will be numbered like 1,2,3 and so on.
Step 5: 'Select disk # command' should be entered. Ensure that # is replaced with your USB drive’s number as explained in the above step.
Step 6: 'Disk # is now the selected disk' is going to be displayed on your screen.
Step 7: Enter 'Clean'.
Step 8: The process of getting your USB drive wiped is going to commence. Its completion time will depend on the size of your drive.
3Use a Third-party Tool - EaseUS Partition Master
You can make use of a third-party tool such as EaseUS Partition Master to wipe USB drive. Follow the steps which are outlined below to make the process work.
Step 1: Get your external device connected to your system and get EaseUS Partition Master launched. It will display your device. Get it right clicked on and choose 'Wipe Data'.
Step 2: Get the number of times which such device should be wiped chosen with 10 being the highest. After that, click on 'OK'.
Step 3: A message will popup informing you that system restart is recommended after the process is complete. Click on 'OK' to continue.
Step 4: Locate 'Execute the operation' at the upper left and click on it. Now click on 'Apply' in order to begin the data wiping process.
Just wait for some time and your USB drive will become empty once again.
Bonus: How to Recover Accidentally Deleted Files from USB Drive?
Have you deleted your files accidentally and don’t know what to do? Do you know that with the use of AnyRecover such files can be recovered within few minutes?
iMyFone AnyRecover has been built with some of the most sophisticated and advanced file recovery features. It means that you don’t have to bother as it will do all of the hard work to ensure that your files are recovered in the best way possible.
Key Features of AnyRecover:
Any form of data loss can be easily recovered. It could be due to formatted hard drive, accidentally deleted files, damaged drive, virus attack and others.
Any type of file can be easily recovered whether such is audio, photo, document, or even video.
Files can be recovered from any device. This could be digital camera, smart phone, USB flash drive, memory card and others.
Data and files can be safely recovered without being overwritten.
Deep scan and preview available ensure accurate and complete recovery.
Steps to Recover Deleted Files from USB Drive:
Step 1: Get AnyRecover tool launched on your system. Choose the location where such data was lost selected. It could be external drive, hard drive or others. How to edit thumbnail on imovie.
Step 2: After you have selected a location, hit “Start” button to begin scanning for your lost data.
Step 3: At this point, just preview the lists to find the files you want. After that, click on “Recover” button to get them back.
Conclusion
How To Completely Wipe A Usb Drive Without
There are lots of methods which enable you to wipe USB drive without any hassle. However, if you accidentally deleted important files, here we recommend you to try AnyRecover since it is very flexible and user-friendly. You’ll find recovering lost files has never been so easy.
Whenever you’re selling or giving away computer or upgrading your hard drive or SSD for something bigger and faster, you need to ensure the data on the hard drive is totally wiped out. That’s because your hard drive is a treasure trove of personal information. If you don’t erase your hard drive before getting rid of it, your personal files or folders could easily get into the wrong hands.
An interesting study was done, in which hundreds of computers were bought secondhand and scoured for personal data. They found a lot. Some drives even had enough data to completely steal the previous owner’s identity.
Erase Hard Drive And Reinstall Windows 10
Simple deleting or formatting does not actually wipe a hard drive. When you format a hard drive or delete a partition, you’re usually only deleting the file system, making the data invisible, but not gone. A hard drive recovery software or specific hardware can easily recover the deleted files or information.
So for the sake of your private information security, you absolutely need to wipe the hard drive before handing your drive over to someone else. Darik’s Boot And Nuke (DBAN) is just that special drive eraser software and can help you with that.
Darik’s Boot and Nuke instructions
Darik’s Boot and Nuke, also know as DBAN is a free data eraser program that securely and completely wipes your hard drive. All your installed applications, personal files, and even the operating system will be removed and no longer recoverable anymore.
DBAN is designed to wipe all data from a physical hard drive, including all of the drive’s partitions. It doesn’t matter how many files are on the drive, what types of files exist, what file system the drive was formatted with, etc.
However, DBAN does not work with SSDs. If you have a Solid State Drive, DBAN will not be able to detect it and so it cannot erase data from it.
If you run DBAN against a hard drive, it will overwrite every single bit of data on it, preventing even the best data recovery programs from retrieving any deleted data from it.
DBAN can wipe data off a disk using one of the following data sanitization methods:
- DoD 5220.22-M
- RCMP TSSIT OPS-II
- Gutmann
- Random Data
- Write Zero
Download DBAN:
Download Darik’s Boot and Nuke from its official website as below.
DBAN will wipe all internal hard drives essential leaving them blank. DBAN will also wipe any attached USB Storage devices such as external hard drives, USB Flash Sticks and memory cards even the Bootable DBAN USB you use to securely wipe the system will be wiped so take extreme caution when using this program.
How to Wipe a Hard Drive? Darik’s Boot and Nuke Tutorial?
In this quick tutorial, I am going to show you how to completely wipe your hard drive using Darik’s Boot and Nuke.
Step 1. Back up your data before wipe your hard drive
Before wiping completely erasing a hard drive, you need to backup everything you want to keep, such as photos, videos, documents, software and more. Once you’ve wiped the hard drive, there will be really no way to get anything on the drive back.
Step 2. Download DBAN – the feee disk wipe software
DBAN is a commonly used program to wipe hard drives with. Although there’re many data destruction programs to do the same task, I prefer using this free application.
To start, you need to download DBAN to the computer you’re going to erase or totally the different one. However you do it, the goal is to get the ISO file downloaded and then burned to a bootable device like a CD or flash drive.
Step 3. Burn DBAN to a CD
Using DBAN requires creating a boot CD. That means you’ll need a blank CD and a computer with a CD burner to get started. It’s possible to create a bootable USB drive as well, if you prefer that option.
If you plan on booting from a CD or DVD to run DBAN, insert a blank disc into your optical read/write drive, then browse the downloaded ISO file. Right-click dban-2.3.0_i586.iso and choose Burn disc image. Work through the image burning wizard and wait as the disc is created.
If you prefer to use a flash drive, you need to burn the ISO image to a USB drive. You can not just copy the DBAN ISO to a USB drive and expect it to work correctly.
Well, let’s continue with booting from CD containing DBAN we’ll be able to wipe our hard drive. Of course, you can also use USB stick too.
This method will also work for earlier versions of Windows, but we’re going to do this demonstration on Windows 10 computer.
Step 4. Boot DBAN from CD
The first thing we’re going to have to do is boot off of the CD. So what we need to restart the computer.
After inserting the CD with this drive eraser tool into the computer, just go to the Start menu and click to restart the computer.
Step 5. Erase your hard drive with Darik’s Boot and Nuke
When you see the DBAN screen, select to boot from CD-ROM Drive, and press [Enter] tab to enter the interactive, guided mode wipe your drive.
Here you get the warning window here letting you know that once you’ve run this tool, there’s really no going back.
Step 6. Select the drive for wiping
Use the arrow keys to select the drive you want to erase and press [Space]. This will flag the drive with [Wipe] flag.
So, once we get to this page we want to type M on the keyboard. And that will get us to the methods page.
Now under wipe methods, use use arrow operant or arrow down keys on our keyboard we can see different options for wiping this computer.
Quick Erase obviously is the least secure wiping method and you can see on the right under security level. It says one-pass security level. If you go further down you can get up to 35 passes and as you can see the security level increases the higher up. And you can actually read a nice little description of what each one of these wipes do for the purpose of this review because there will be the quickest I’m going to select Quick Erase.
If you’re looking to erase your hard drive for good and you have time to wait, I would recommend going all the way down to the Gutmann Wipe. But I’m going just click Quick Erase for the purpose of this tutorial. I’m going to click on enter and now you have select which hard drive you want to don’t lead.
Now for the most people there should only be one drive you might have a secondary one if you have a recovery drive. Just make sure you select the right one. Typically it’ll be the primary partition that has the most amount of hard drive space.
Step 7. Start wiping your hard drive
So I’m going to click enter again, then you see the word wipe appears inside that quotation marks. If you’re ready to wipe, the wiping process will start. This hard drive erasing will take a little while depending on your hard drive size.
The Quick Erase process is about 15 minutes or so. When DBAN succeeded, the hard drive has been successfully deleted. And we can see all selected disk have been wiped, as well as the start data and finish date. So it’s pretty quick to actually begin doing this operation and you also use USB sticks to perform this action as well. I just typically use a CD because I just find it to be a little easier.
Last, Restart your computer
At last, we just press any key to continue. This point I’m going to try and restart the computer.
Once you boot from the computer, you can see that no boot file name has been received. So this computer is basically trashed at this point again. I cannot stress it enough, that make sure you have backed up all the files on the hard drive before using Darik’s Boot and Nuke to wipe your disk. I know it sounds obvious but I am sure it has happened before and I am sure someone is going to do it and then realize their mistake afterwards. So just try and take a little bit caution when doing this.
The bottom LINE:
Darik’s Boot and Nuke is a great free drive eraser tool I’ve used before. I hope this tutorial would help you guys out. Thank you!