How to wipe a USB hard drive

How to wipe a USB hard drive I have a USB hard drive that I'm planning on donating. Before I donate it, however, I want to be sure that it has been completely and unrecoverably wiped of personal information.
Asked by: Guest \| Views: 239

Total answers/comments: 5

Comments display order:

Guest [Entry]

"If you download the latest Beta Version of DBAN, it states that it supports USB.

I have tested it and it is a good beta build - it works fine.... Just one reported bug when you unplug a USB drive mid-wipe, but who would do that!"

Guest [Entry]

"If you're running Windows 2000 or better there is a built-in command line utility that overwites deleted data making it unrecoverable.

cipher /w:driveletter:\foldername

more detailed information"

Guest [Entry]

"All of the other answers do provide ways to prevent the drive from being read using OS based recovery tools, however if the drive swapped out sectors due to bad sector errors/wear leveling. The data could be recoverable by reading the media directly and bypassing the controller.

See this answer from the security SE site for more details and read the Inaccessible media areas section on Wikipedia's ""Data remanence"" article. Once something has been written on any drive (flash USB key/SSD/Spinning Disk) if you can not bypass the controller and write directly to the media (Even DBAN can not overwrite bad sectors) then you can not trust that the data is ever ""gone""."

Guest [Entry]

"If you use nearly any Linux distro, you can use the shred command.
Can also be installed in bash on Windows and run that way."

Guest [Entry]

"You also use free Western Digital Data Diagnostic tools here.

The instructions are here, it will write zeros to all disk."