How do you sanitize a USB Drive?

Retro6

Retro6

Retro6

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A bought a bunch of new flash drives for very cheap. They are made by Interal but they all have this silly AES 256-BIT Encryption stuff on them and they are unusable. I want to wipe them all clean so I can use them. I've tried doing it in Windows but it wont let me format them or anything so I will need something more that can use to sanitize them.

Any ideas?
 
I don't think I have diskpart. It just took me to the command prompt and I have no idea on what to do from there. The drive letter for the USB drive is G: I've tried fdisk and format G: but Windows 10 don't recognize the commands and disk management gives me zero options
 
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Diskpart is included with Windows but yeah, it is a command line tool.

Open diskpart (as admin), it opens the command line tool, type list disk which shows you all your drives, i.e:

Code: 
DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online         1907 GB  1024 KB        *
  Disk 1    Online          465 GB  1024 KB        *
  Disk 2    Online         1863 GB  1024 KB        *
  Disk 3    Online         4096 MB  1024 KB        *

In my case disk 3 is my USB stick so I'd type: select disk 3 and then clean which would wipe all the partitions/partition layout of the USB stick. Then you can re-initialize the stick with the usual disk management GUI tool. Just make sure you don't run clean on the wrong drive :p
 
I tried it, it shows as the USB drive being 0 GB but there are two partitions on it. I tried the clean but just gives an error.

I think I will need something more where I can forcefully wipe them... it boggles my mind why the hell Interal put this rubbish on these drives. I will dig out my Linux laptop and try G-Parted or run a LIVE CD with G-Parted... I'm tired so I will try again tomorrow. Thanks anyway much appreciated.
 
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Nope I tried again but I can not wipe it.

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Ah my bad, I didn't realise you meant it had actual hardware encryption. Usually cheap 'encrypted' USB sticks just use software encryption which you can just format to remove. What does it show in disk management for that drive?

I'd give gparted and/or dban a go, but I wouldn't be surprised if neither of those can fully remove/disable the encryption either because it's done via a separate hardware chip
 
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If I follow your screenshots correctly, only a virtual CD drive from the stick shows up in Windows?

I have a vague recollection that some sticks only show their actual storage after a low-level USB command (which the manufacturer's Windows software will send).
I think there's a mode switch command on Linux that can enable the storage mode without running the Windows software.
 
You could try downloading gparted (https://gparted.org/liveusb.php) I used to use it a lot to help manage partitions. That might allow to force the deletion/wipe of the drive. But just be careful with your own OS disks as I used to have to boot from a live ISO CD when I last used it.
 
Cd drive G should automatically run when you insert it
That's integral total lock
Ie the software to password/unlock/lock the drive

If it doesn't automatically run
It may be due to a security policy on your pc preventing autorun
Or is your pc on a domain?

Got a Samsung t5 which is encrypted
But don't remember if can wipe it using diskpart
And the force command
If you can get total lock to run 6 incorrect password attempts
Will wipe it for you
Though if they're new shouldn't be any password anyway
 
I don't know why CD Drive F: shows, I've only got one optical drive... I think something weird happened when I tried to burn some files to a CD last week but this is unrelated to the USB drive. I've not had much time today to try again. I'll run G-Parted in a bit and see what it does.

The USB stick does come with software when its plugged in it asks me to create a password but always complains that my password doesn't contain enough capital letters or lower case letters or not enough numbers so I don't know what to put, not sure if its a bug in the software but seems bizarre that it complaints no matter what password I try to create.
 
I tried G-Parted in Linux but the drive doesn't show in G-Parted so no luck with that.

I can open the drive in Linux and it displays as a CD with lots of locked icons.

I know there must be a way of wiping these USB drives as I bought one from CEX a while ago that had already been wiped.
 
I managed to create a password that it likes and I can now get into the USB drive but I still can't get rid off the CDFS partition. I can format it as much as I like but the CDFS partition remains. I need something to nuke it so that I don't have to keep entering the password each time I use it.

I've also tried a few peices of software including Ventoy which has always been handy as a quick & easy way to repair corrupted USB drives.
 
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Mcnumpty2323 said:
Did you try diskpart select partition?
Not just Select disk
List disk
Select disk x
List partition
Select partition x
Clean

Or this software claims it can deal with cdfs
Never personally tried it though

Fix USB Drive Detected But Not Accessible. | FormatUsb

Fix USB Drive Detected But Not Accessible. Format USB drive to Fat32/NTFS/UDF/exFAT/ext2/ext3
formatusb.com formatusb.com
Click to expand...
Thanks I'll give that a try... I've just tried those commands but it says there are no partitions to show so I'll try that link. Edit: Nope no joy with that either.
 
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I've tried everything so far without any joy I even tried to corrupt the drive to see if I could wipe it that way.

I also found the one I bought from CEX that was already wiped and that one doesn't have the crypto logo on it.

I think the above poster was correct that these crypto versions have a built in hardware chip where there is no getting around it. Back in the old days there used to be software called Sanitizer that would wipe hard drives, I think the modern equivalent to that would be something called Blancco but probably no good for these USB drives anyway. Oh well its only 12 pounds wasted. I might try Knoppix to see if I can do something with that or maybe Kali might have something... failing that there is also Hex Editor but most likely I wont be able to do much if anything at all.
 
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Somewhere I have a usb software
Typically I forget the name of it
But years ago I was messing around with bit flipping
On a flash drive (trying to make it appear as a fixed drive)
Was 128gb which wasn't exactly cheap back then
Anyway I made the thing totally unusable
Tried a load of softwares until finally
I found one that fixed it
Once I have the pc on will try to see if I stored it somewhere

It may well be as its hardware encryption
That as said there's a chip involved
And you can't do anything
But it was cheap anyway sometimes you win
Sometimes you lose

Edit
Name just popped into my brain

JetFlash Online Recovery | Software Download - Transcend Information, Inc.

JetFlash Online Recovery is a repair tool specifically developed for Transcend JetFlash USB flash drives. In an attempt to repair your flash drive when it is no longer recognized by PCs or not working properly, the JetFlash Online Recovery provides the initial help by restoring your flash drive...
www.transcend-info.com www.transcend-info.com

Second edit
The drive I fixed with this wasnt a transcend one
But it fixed it anyway
 
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Try minitool partition wizard to delete partition and recreate. There is a free version.
Also try rufus to force it to become a USB boot disk that might work.
 
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