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It looks like I am in deep trouble. A day ago I created an encrypted partition on my USB using the Tails disk utility and set a pass phrase to "remember until I logout". When I rebooted and tried to start Tails again I was unsuccessful. So I started my Windows OS and tried to open my USB drive contents but a message appeared saying "You need to format your disk again in order to use this USB". So I formatted the flash drive using the default FAT32 format but I was shocked to discover my USB space was not 16 GB; it was 6.8 GB, which means the encrypted partition of some 7 GB is not appearing. I again installed Tails on that 6.8GB space but when I started Tails again there was no encrypted partition appearing there either. So how can I empty my USB once again? How can I delete that encrypted partition? Also for future reference, how do I deal with the encrypted partitions using Tails?

Roya
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Torlearner
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  • Welcome to Windows, where flash storage with multiple paritions has been broken for years. Do you have access to another (non-Windows) system which you can erase the drive on? If so, dd if=/dev/urandom of=yourdisk bs=4k (they keys are really all you need to erase, and I assume they're stored right at the beginning of the partition, but I didn't check). –  Jan 14 '15 at 14:56
  • Also, if you run diskmgmt on Windows, can you see the paritions there? (note that deleting them there will not erase them securely, I'm just curious if they show up at all, or if you're only looking for a drive in My Computer which won't show up because Windows can't recognize the encrypted filesystem). –  Jan 14 '15 at 14:58
  • Try these steps to repartition your usb drive. –  Jan 14 '15 at 20:08
  • This question has little to do with Tor or Tails, except perhaps the very last sentence. The basic solution to the problem of removing the encrypted partition is to use an appropriate partition manager, either on Windows or Linux. GParted works well on Linux; diskmgmt works well on Windows. – CrimsonDark Jan 16 '15 at 11:54

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