Usb Flash Drive Eraser

• Flash Drive Eraser
• Hard Drive Eraser Usb Bootable
• Usb Flash Drive Eraser

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. Eraser is a free program that is recommended by the creators of DBAN (a bootable hard drive erasing tool).

One eraser is used for the flash drive and the other will serve as the cap. You'll want to use almost all of one eraser for the drive and about half for the cap. 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.

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?
ŸHow 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.

ŸMethod 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.

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. Xbox looking glass.

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 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.

CAUTION: The steps below will completely wipe the data from the USB drive you select. Make sure you choose the correct drive and backup any files on the drive you may need to keep. For example, this USB drive is F:

METHOD 1: Using the cipher command line tool

cipher is a built-in command line tool in the Windows operating system that can be used to encrypt or decrypt data on drives.

It can be used to securely erase the FREE SPACE on a USB drive. Note – this is FREE SPACE only – if you want to erase the entire drive you must first format the drive so that it ALL free space.

Flash Drive Eraser

The free space is overwritten three times:

• with a series of 0's
• with a series of 255's
• with a series of random numbers

1. Click on the Windows button at the bottom left of the screen, type 'cmd' and when it appears in the list click on 'Command Prompt'
2. Enter the following command making sure to replace X with the drive letter you want to erase

METHOD 2: Using the diskpart command line tool

diskpart is a built-in command line tool in the Windows operating system that is normally used to manage drives, partitions and mappings (partitions to letters) .

It can also be used to erase a USB drive by removing all existing partitions and writing a series of o's.

1. Click on the Windows button at the bottom left of the screen, type 'cmd' and when it appears in the list click on 'Command Prompt'
2. Enter the following command to start diskpart
3. The diskpart program will load, once it's ready you will see 'DISKPART>' at the command prompt.
4. Now enter
5. This will list all drives connected to the computer, each represented by a number (1, 2, 3 etc) – determine which is the USB drive by the amount of space. In this case it is Disk 3 but it may be different for your computer.
6. Enter in the following command, making sure to replace # with the number of your drive from above
7. The screen will display 'Disk # is now the selected disk'. Now enter
8. The wiping process will now start and may take several minutes to complete – depending on the size of the drive. When finished you will have an empty USB drive ready to reformat.

OPTIONAL STEPS: Format drive using diskpart

If you want to reformat the drive (assign a partition type and drive letter) you can do this using diskpart by entering the following commands.

NOTE: replace FAT32 with NTFS if you would prefer to use the NTFS. See

Hard Drive Eraser Usb Bootable

If you're not sure which is right for you – check out FAT32 vs NTFS – how to pick the right format for your USB drive.

METHOD 3: Using Eraser (third-party software)

Eraser is a free program that is recommended by the creators of DBAN (a bootable hard drive erasing tool).

Usb Flash Drive Eraser

1. Install and run
2. Right-click in the middle area and choose ‘New Task'
3. Under ‘Task Type' choose ‘Run Immediately'
4. Click on the ‘Add Data' button
5. Under ‘Target Type' choose ‘Drive/Partition'
6. Then from the list choose the drive you want to erase completely
7. Optional: you can also choose the erase algorithm using ‘Erasure method' – but I would only do this if I knew 100% what and why.
8. Click ‘OK' to save the changes
9. The task should now look something like this
10. Click ‘OK' to save the changes
11. Eraser will now start wiping the drive – it may take awhile depending on the size of the drive.