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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. 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. One minute or two later, a bootable USB drive with DBAN in it has been successfully created. Now, plug in the USB drive into the computer you want to wipe out and boot it up. Note that, if you boot up DBAN off a USB hard drive, select autonuke option would wipe out all.
Due to my rampant experimentation with many different Linux distros, I often times have to wipe a USB drive completely after making it a bootable live USB for something like OpenSUSE. If you used the Imagewriter.exe program used to create the drive, you’ll have a hard time later on if you try to use uNetBootin to make a live USB for a different distro. You can use bootice.exe in Windows to restore the drive. Here’s how to do it with fdisk in Linux (courtesy of PenDriveLinux.com)Restoring your USB key to it’s original state using Linux:
First we need to delete the old partitions that remain on the USB key.
- Open a terminal and type sudo su
- Type fdisk -l and note your USB drive letter.
- Type fdisk /dev/sdx (replacing x with your drive letter)
- Type d to proceed to delete a partition
- Type 1 to select the 1st partition and press enter
- Type d to proceed to delete another partition (fdisk should automatically select the second partition)
Try adobe premiere pro. Dec 07, 2020 Connect USB drive and type following command in the CMD assuming E: is the USB drive letter Cipher /w:E: and press Enter; Let it wipe your USB drive’s empty storage once with a series of 0’s (zero) then with a series of 255’s and finally once again with a series of random numbers; b. Use SDelete to Erase Data from USB Flash Drive. The fastest and most effective way to do this is to format it. Formatting will delete everything on the USB flash drive and leave you with a device that has its’ maximum possible amount of available storage space. Deleting Everything on a USB Flash Drive in Windows 7. The steps in this article were performed on the Windows 7 operating system.
Next we need to create the new partition.
- Type n to make a new partition
- Type p to make this partition primary and press enter
- Type 1 to make this the first partition and then press enter
- Press enter to accept the default first cylinder
- Press enter again to accept the default last cylinder
- Type w to write the new partition information to the USB key
- Type umount /dev/sdx (replacing x with your drive letter)
The last step is to create the fat filesystem.
- Type mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdx1 (replacing x with your USB key drive letter)
Usb Drive Wipe Utility
That’s it, you should now have a restored USB key with a single fat 32 partition that can be read from any computer.