Erasing USB flash drive thoroughly

I can't find a proper forum to ask this simple question

I want to sell a USB flash drive, and of course don't want to leave any bit of my file/data on it. Is simply erasing the files or formatting the drive enough? On HDD an expert can recover erased files, what about on the USB drive?

 

Reformat the USB drive as many times as you want to be safe. Don't do quick format if you have sensitive stuff on there. Format to NTFS if not already.

 

Don't format the drive, that isn't enough. With a format, the entire old partition can still be recovered.

If you know the location of the drive, you can use dd to clean it off. Make you specifiy the entire drive (sda) versus a single partition (sda1). If you don't know the location of the drive, the the command fdisk -l as root to find out.

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=[b]/dev/sdX[/b]

Make sure to adjust it for the right device, and triple check before you start. dd has no problems clearing anything you set it to without confirmation, so don't aim it at your hard drive.

If you not a Linux guy and don't understand what I just said, you can still follow these directions. Download GParted, burn it to a disk, and boot from it. When it loads, use the GUI to find out the location of your thumbdrive. After that, open a terminal (its on the top left, move the GParted window if you have to) and use dd to clean it off.

 

I don't know why my post was moved to this forum. I had posted it on Windows OS/Software forum. I'm using windows xp... No clue about Linux Thank you both for your replies. It sounds more involving than I had thought--or is it because it was thought to be linux related?

(Moderator: could you please move this question back to the Windows forums or a more suitable one? it has nothing to do with Linux. Thanks)

 

How about after I deleted all the files, I try to save a lot of huge junk files that use up all the storage (e.g. videos...). Will that make the previously saved file unrecoverable?

 

Check out Eraser.
It's a powerful program that allows you to properly erase drives.
Be carefull though and make sure you know how touse the program, you don't want to accidentally erase anything else but the intended USB drive.
By the way, if you have completely filled the USB drive with video's, all previous stuff will have been overwritten.
Cheers.

 

Thanks, that sounds like the easiest way, since my USB drive is 2~4GB only (perhaps not suitable for sale anyway )

Edit: Moderator: thank you very much for moving this thread back to this forum!

 

ok, there is a much simpler solution. i have a very good encryption program, named PGP. first. i pgp shred the files which is garunteed to securely delete files. next, i encrypt the whole drive with 4096 bit encryption. then, reformat it.

after thats, its well and truly gone.


ev