How do you sanitize a USB Drive?

[Retro6]

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?

 

[Retro6]

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

 

[Retro6]

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.

 

[Retro6]

Nope I tried again but I can not wipe it.

 

[Retro6]

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.

 

[Retro6]

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.

 

[Retro6]

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.

 

[Retro6]

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

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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.

 

[Retro6]

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.