How Do You Completely Wipe A Flash Drive

USB Flash drives are one of luminous and disparate invention to store thousands of files in one convenient location. There are myriad of reasons to use USB flash drives over CD and DVDs. They are portable, fast and easy to use and carry. But after using it for few times, you might need to erase data from USB flash drive to make some more room to store new data or sell it.

1. How Do You Completely Wipe A Flash Drives

On a Mac, right-click the drive you want to wipe and select 'Encrypt' and then follow its prompts. If you don't see that prompt, it may be because the drive was formatted for use with Windows. Many manufacturers are now providing tools that will allow you to manage the drive and securely wipe it but should your drive not have such a tool there are few perfect workarounds. Aside from reverse-engineering a tool to manage the memory controller the best method I know of is to do many successive writes. Click in a blank area inside the flash drive window and press 'Ctrl-A' to select all the files. Press the 'Delete' key and wait for the files to delete. Step 5 Right-click the 'Recycle Bin' and choose 'Empty Recycle Bin.'

A simple deletion will not really erase everything from the USB flash drive securely since any advanced computer user can easily recover them in no time using any data recovery software. You will be amused to see how easy it is to get back all the deleted data in no time. So, if you have any sensitive information stored from company or client information then you must erase them using some third party software to make sure all data are securely deleted and can never be restored using any data recovery software whatsoever. So most people choose to wipe data on computer or wipe Mac clean before selling.

In this guide, we will introduce you to two methods that helps to erase data on USB flash drive permanently. Both are free to implement and can get the job done as quickly as possible to give you the best user experience.

If you do not wanna waste time going through my unnecessarily long steps, here are the short steps that helped me: 1) Insert the USB flash drive into the USB port. How to find pdf. 2) Click Start, type devmgmt.msc in the Search textbox and press Enter. 3) Find Disk Drives and expand it. 4) Find the USB flash drive you want to format, and double-click it. After you have booted into the bootable USB Secure Erase tool you will see a list of all drives identified by the model number and to the left will be the name of the drive as identified by the Secure Erase tool. Enter the Device name (indicated above by the red circle) of the drive you want to Secure Erase.

Method #1: Wipe USB Flash Drive by Using In-built Format Option

All Windows and Mac computers comes with an in-built format disk option to erase everything from a USB flash drive. We will show you how to use this feature as your advantage to make sure everything is deleted permanently.

Step 1. Insert the USB flash drive to the computer and let the PC detect it.

Step 2. Open 'My Computer' and right-click on the flash drive disk name.

Step 3. Find 'Format' from the option and make a left click on it with the help of your mouse.

Step 4. You will be able to see a window with the following option.

It will show you the storage capacity and file system. By default, it can be either NTFS or FAT32 and the volume label just indicates the name of the flash drive. Just leave it to the default settings and click on 'Start'.

Step 5. Wait for few minutes until the formatting process is finished. It may take several minutes depending on the size of the USB Flash drive. Make sure to keep it connected while the process is taking place.

Step 6. After you see the 'Format Successful' pop up messages, you can eject the flash drive.

Warning: This should delete all the files from the flash drive. But as we mentioned earlier, a simple deletion and formatting doesn't really permanently delete everything from the USB drive, they're still be easily recovered by some data recovery softweare. . If the files are not important then you can use this simple deletion option but if you do have confidential company and client information stored in it then you might have to use a professional external tool to erase everything permanently.

Method #2: How to Completely Wipe USB Flash Drive with SafeWiper for Disk

To reduce the risk that someone might recover sensitive data from your USB flash drive, you need to use eraser software to securely erase data from removable USB disk.

SafeWiper for Disk is a professional data deletion tool that erases everything from a drive disk permanently. This little tool deletes data from a disk drive as it never existed on the first place. So, if you are erasing confidential and sensitive data from your USB flash drive then it is assured that the data deletion is beyond recovery. No data recovery has succeeded to recover data from any drive after being deleted using SafeWiper. It is easy to use but to use advanced deletion techniques, you will have to pay a small fee to enjoy the full benefits of this software.

Safewiper for Disk - Permanently Wipe Your USB Drive

• Wipe data and hard drives permanently beyond recovery.
• Permanently wipes data on partitions and disk volumes with advanced wiping algorithm which overwrites your data up to 35 times.
• Uses advanced algorithms (Dod 5220-22.M, US Army, Peter Guttman) to 100% completely wipe data.
• Supports all popular Windows file systems, NTFS, Fat, Fat32.

Download SafeWiper for Disk on your computer, install and run it. SafeWiper for Disk offers to complete hard drives or logical hard drives. So you either completely remove everything from a hard disk or only the hierarchical partitions created from the hard disk. Choose the USB flash drive disk and click on 'Next'.

Click the Setting on the proram, you will see four wiping method in the list. You can use the featured high level deletion techniques including Peter Guttmann Secure Deletion, North Atlantic Treaty Organization_NATO standard, Guttmann Method and so on. The more advnaced wiping algorithm you choose, the more time it will take.

After choosing the wiping method, simply click on 'Wipe' and the program will automatically start erasing everything from the USB flash drive. Wait for few minutes until the data are securely removed from the disk drive.

Now, you can audit the USB flash drive and everything will be permanently erased.

Note: Realize that the data deleted using this software is permanent and there's no going back after this. So, make sure to generate a full back up before using this software.

Summary:

It is recommended to use professional external software like SafeWiper Data Wiper to permanently delete everything from a USB flash drive if it contains any classified and private data to make sure nobody can steal it. Any computer genius can easily recover deleted data from your USB flash drive if you use the simple deletion technique. You must take a step further to maintain the safety and privacy of the data. Hopefully, you guys enjoyed and found this article useful.

Do you want to permanently wipe USB flash drive and ensure that data cannot be recovered by anybody? There are two methods here to safely clear data off USB drive and make nothing recoverable.

Overview on wiping USB drive
When do you need to wipe a USB drive?
�How to completely wipe a USB drive?
Method 1: Wipe USB Flash Drive by Using Inbuilt Format Option
Method 2: Completely wipe USB Flash Drive with Eassos DiskGenius

Overview on wiping USB drive

USB flash drive is a miniature high-capacity mobile storage product that uses a USB interface to connect a computer. It is portable, fast and easy to use and carry. Like hard disk, you may need to wipe a USB flash drive sometimes.

When do you need to wipe a USB drive?

• Get some more space to store new data. Erasing USB drive deletes all data on the device and you can get all free space to be reused.
• The data is sensitive information that needs to delete permanently.
• Secure erase all the data on the USB flash drive before selling the device.
• Remove unknown virus or malware on USB flash drive.
• Change file system format, such as change FAT32 to NTFS, convert NTFS to exFAT or Ext4.

How to completely wipe a USB drive?

You cannot wipe data from the USB flash drive completely with a simple deletion or formatting, because any one can easily recover them with using any data recovery software. USB drive recovery programs can be easily downloaded from the Internet and it is quite easy to retrieve deleted or formatted data from USB drives. To completely clear an SD card, hard drive or USB flash drive needs extra operations. In this instruction, I will show you two methods that to erase data on USB flash drive permanently.

�Method 1: Wipe USB Flash Drive by Using Inbuilt Format Option

All computers using Windows system comes with an inbuilt format option to erase everything from a USB flash drive. However, many of us format disks by way of quick format which completes within seconds, but cannot clean data for good. Actually, we can perform a full format on USB drive, which is able to erase data byte by byte so that files cannot be recovered by any means. How to clean data completely using the full formatting option? Let's have a close look at the process:

Step 1 Insert the USB flash drive into your computer, wait a few second and let the computer do its job - detect the USB flash drive and install the USB driver.

Step 2 Open File Explorer by double-clicking This PC and you can find the drive icon of your USB drive.

Step 3 Open the USB flash drive and move the important data to computer hard drive in order to create a backup.

Step 4 Right-click on the USB flash drive that you want to wipe and select 'Format' option from the context menu.

How do i download an app to my computer. Step 5 Select file system type from drop-down list and set Allocation unit size. If you do not know how to choose, you can follow suggested option.

Step 6 Unselect 'Quick Format' option and click Start button. Then Windows will start full formatting the selected drive.

Note: Quick format does not erase data permanently, and you can recover lost data from formatted disk easily using data recovery software, while full formatting takes longer time to complete and wipes data complete. If this drive contains important data, you should create a backup in advance.

Method 2: Completely wipe USB Flash Drive with Eassos DiskGenius

Apart from full formatting USB drive, you can also use third-party software to wipe a USB drive. Here we recommend a free Windows partition manager – Eassos DiskGenius to clear data for you. DiskGenius can erase data of any partition or hard disk or USB flash drive directly and easily that the data cannot be recovered by any data recovery software. When erasing data, you can make some other settings.

Step 1 How to unzip something. Launch Eassos DiskGenius software from your computer.

Step 2 Select the USB flash drive that you want to erase data and then click on 'Tools' from the main menu and click on 'Erase Sectors' option.

DiskGenius will pop up this window:

In this window, you can set these following options:

• Change the partition or disk or USB flash drive you want to erase data
• You can specify the sector range that the data need to be erased. If you select to erase data of partition, the sector number means the beginning and the ending sector of the partition.
• You can appoint hex characters to fill sectors.
• You can also set the computer's behavior when you finish the erasing data

Step 3 Click 'Erase'. You can see the following warning message prompting the operating erases data permanently and wiped data cannot be recovered.

Step 4 Click 'Erase' button if you do want to erase data. Also, you can cancel it if you change your decision.

Step 5 Wait for the process to complete.

If you think this software satisfies your requirement, you can download this tool to erase data. Files cleared by this feature cannot be recovered, which is a good option to protect privacy.

How Do You Completely Wipe A Flash Drives