1

I have a USB flash drive that's become unreadable in any computer. It has a lot of confidential information on it which I need to wipe before sending it back to the manufacturer for a warranty replacement.

What would be the best way to do this given that I can't get any computer to read the drive and format it?

Hennes
  • 65,142
volume one
  • 111
  • 1
    Hopefully if your computer can't read it, no one else's would be able to either. – BenjiWiebe Jul 17 '14 at 12:40
  • Have you tried the USB stick in a Mac or Linux computer ? – Lawrence Jul 17 '14 at 12:56
  • No I've only tried it on Windows 7 and Windows 8 machines. I tried using DiskPart in MSDOS and it throws an error. But the drive appears in Device Manager with the correct name and I get the USB 'sound' when I plug it in. But nothing appears in Disk Management. – volume one Jul 17 '14 at 13:21
  • @Ramhound - Is there a safe way to apply over-voltage or reverse-voltage to the D pins directly, such as from a 9V battery? Would this wipe or positively ruin the USB drive? Again, safe, and the principle is not to do more damage. – arch-abit Jul 17 '14 at 18:24
  • Open it up, figure out which pins are ground and VCC on the actual flash memory chip, and apply voltage (+5 Vdc will work) in reverse polarity to the chip, not to the USB connector. Your data should exit as smoke. It's possible the actual data might still be in there, but without pretty sophisticated technology it's probably not going anywhere. – Steve Jul 17 '14 at 21:35
  • Two words: microwave oven. – Kenster Jul 17 '14 at 21:51
  • most likely if the manufacturer gets it working he will not even look at the data on there and might even wipe it or send another one. And most likely that if you can't read it(and you tested it well) and they can't, they'll recognize it as defective and send you a replacement. And they're not data recovery experts and won't be looking at the data on a defective drive. – barlop Jul 17 '14 at 22:20
  • Its a Corsair USB drive. I thought that they would look at the drive inside-out, including trying to get data from it, for quality control purposes because its not even 6 months old. Hence I'm worried about databases and documents being retrieved from it. I'd rather it was formatted in some way but I guess this is not possible. – volume one Jul 17 '14 at 23:14
  • +1 for microwave open, it will blow away all information from flash. It also will ruin the device in all parts, chips, every electronic circuit most likely will have a failure after. – Ruslan Gerasimov Jul 18 '14 at 10:24
  • 1
    @RuslanGerasimov it may also melt the drive so my warranty will be void! – volume one Jul 18 '14 at 13:15

  • What would be the best way to do this given that
    I can't get any computer to ead the drive and format it?

    I understand that you can not read from it. But what does that mean? Does it fail with an error when you try to read any data from it? Or does it try to read and returns garbage?

    In the latter case it is [sort off] accesible and you could try to write to it. E.g. by using dd to write raw nulls to the whole device.

     – Hennes Oct 22 '15 at 12:02
  • 1
    Other than that. If it has confidential information and you can not securely wipe it, then make the unpleasant choice between destroying the drive or applying for warranty. And for really sensitive information the choice should be easy. (Though I admit if often is not, and if this is a flash drive from work then there probably will be a long discussion about it which will cost way more than a new drive. Such is life). – Hennes Oct 22 '15 at 12:05
  • If you're that worried about the data, then eat the money you spent on the drive and smash it into little bits with a hammer. It's the only way to be sure the data isn't going anywhere. – Michael Kohne Oct 22 '15 at 12:11

0 Answers0