How can I delete everything on a flash drive without actually formatting it?

Question

I purchased a new 64 GB flash drive. It came formatted in the FAT32 file system. It came preloaded with some software that I don't want:

However, Windows will not format a drive larger than 32 GB in FAT32, so formatting the drive to erase the software isn't an option for me. How can I delete everything on the flash drive without actually formatting it?

Obviously, one way to do it (at least in Windows 7) is:

In Windows Explorer, click Organize > Folder and search options > View > Show hidden files, folders, and drives.
Then click Organize > Select All and press the Delete key.

But is there a more rigorous way to erase everything on the drive? I want to ensure that the preloaded software is completely gone from the drive.

Why do you want a more complicated solution then just deleting the files? — Ramhound, Jan 20 '18 at 20:40
@Ramhound I want to make sure that the software (bloatware) is completely gone from the flash drive before I back up my documents to it. — Andrew, Jan 20 '18 at 20:42
Not like it changes anything... Deleted files usually stay deleted. It's not going to automagically infect your PC. — u1686_grawity, Jan 20 '18 at 21:33

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 20 '18 at 22:46

You could always use Rufus. It formats partitions of any technically acceptable size as FAT32, meaning up to 2³²-1 blocks. It can also do a lot of other things, but that’s not relevant here.

Keep in mind that Windows’ 32 GiB limitation with FAT32 is purely a design decision. A crappy one, too.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 20 '18 at 23:34

The easiest way to do this is with the diskpart utility.

Open a command prompt and enter

diskpart

Then enter:

list disk

You will see a list of your drives. Enter:

select disk #

Where number is your flash drive. Next, enter:

clean

That will totally wipe the drive and anything that was on it including the partitions and file system. Afterwards, you can exit diskpart and the command prompt and go to the diskmgmt tool in Windows (it can be found in the search bar) and right click your flash drive, select New Simple Volume, choose NTFS as the file system, and set it up. This will prevent the formatting issue in the future.

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 21 '18 at 00:02

Unless you have a need to keep a FAT32 filesystem, which I highly doubt, format the drive as NTFS. NTFS is a much better filesystem that supports more features, faster speed, and higher security. FAT32 is a 20+ year old filesystem, which the drive was most likely formatted as to offer compatibility to non-Windows systems.

00728M · Answer 4 · 2018-01-21T01:13:49.577

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EDIT: As mentioned below, this is not effective for flash memory, I will leave this up for information purposes only.

if reformatting the drive is absolutely not an option, you can use a secure delete utility such as srm. It not only deletes the files, but also overwrites them so that they cannot be recovered by examining the block device. You should note that srm is only available for POSIX systems, so it might be worth loading up a linux live CD. Here is a link:

http://srm.sourceforge.net/

edited Jan 21 '18 at 01:13

answered Jan 20 '18 at 20:48

00728M

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Are you sure this would work on a flash drive? the system can't force a write to a specific hardware location because that's all hidden by the controller. – fixer1234 Jan 21 '18 at 00:38
I am aware that srm may not be appropriate for flash drives that have seen a lot of use because of wear-leveling techniques that will move things around. Considering that this is a new drive, I doubt that those blocks will have been copied elsewhere. As for your statement about not being able to write to specific location, I believe you are correct. – 00728M Jan 21 '18 at 01:10

How can I delete everything on a flash drive without actually formatting it?

4 Answers4