How do I COMPLETELY erase Flashdrive?

adaadat

How do I completely erase everything on a flash-drive, so it cannot be recovered?

Thanks.

Toxteth_OGrady

http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/download.php

:cool:

TOG

adaadat

Thanks.

I saw this before but couldn't see any mention of flashdrives.

I'll give it a go, though.

ubergeek

Completely agree with TOG. Fantastic bit of software.

For erasing drives without booting up, use the floppy or cd based Darik Boot and Nuke. Comes with Eraser.

motorguy

Out of curiosity, if its a usb drive and you have any fear of data being recovered, why reuse it at all? why not just break it up? unless its over 2Gb, they're buttons to buy these days.

unrich

If it wasn't yours in the first place you may want to return it clean.

The pauper's way is to format the drive. Then copy any old stuff (set up files, windows cab files, etc ) and paste them on and fill the drive completely.
Repeat a couple of times and finally format the drive clean.

The repeats are for hard disks where the drive heads can move and using quite advanced techniques data can still be recovered from a "wiped" drive.

I suppose for flash drives the data is either there or it isn't (no magnetic trace). So a single overwite will get rid. But there again there will be a physics research lab with government funding who can read the data with a quantum resonance diffuse shadow tracking widget. (I'm guessing).

Buy a new one and lump hammer the old one if you're paranoid. Make some excuses if it wasn't yours.