- #SECURE ERASE USB FLASH DRIVE FULL#
- #SECURE ERASE USB FLASH DRIVE SOFTWARE#
- #SECURE ERASE USB FLASH DRIVE DOWNLOAD#
There's a few possible ways to get rid of the data - one of them is to just remove the partition with gparted, and create a new empty one.
#SECURE ERASE USB FLASH DRIVE DOWNLOAD#
Otherwise, you can download Live CD, burn it to a disk, and boot from it. You didn't mention what OS are you using - for most of them you can get it with package manager. It is an open-source utility for disk managment, supporting a bunch of file systems. Taking responsibility for their actions and paying for mistakes is something that adults are expected to do.Īs mentioned, use gparted utility. If that happened to me, I'd offer to pay my employer the costs (hardware and administrative) to them caused by my foolish carelessness. However, having stored personal data on a corporate resource, I sense that you are now looking for a solution that doesn't take corporate ethics and professionalism as a key point of reference.Īll in all, someone might regard it as a lucky blessing unfortunate minor disaster if their sister's Rottweiler chewed the device up and crushed the storage chips inside before they could rescue it. I would give some consideration to explaining the situation to your employer and working with them to resolve the issue to mutual satisfaction. This means that, just because you have forgotten the password, it doesn't mean a corporate administrator can't gain access to the data secured on the device.
#SECURE ERASE USB FLASH DRIVE FULL#
Part of this is making provision for lost passwords by having a separate administrative password that can allow an administrator to regain full access to a device where the user's personal password has been lost. Large serious companies that take security seriously are likely to purchase devices that can be centrally managed. U3 has some security weaknesses which allow you to bypass the password (Google will find this) but it is likely your device is better than U3.
#SECURE ERASE USB FLASH DRIVE SOFTWARE#
Therefore no recovery/formatting/overwriting software can help. So if you don't enter the password, your computer cannot see the encrypted storage at all. Only when you enter the password into the U3 software does the software make the encrypted device visible to the computer - which then assigns it a separate drive-letter (in the case of Windows) to that assigned to the pseudo-CD-ROM. The encrypted data is in a non-visible "device" that the computer cannot see.
When you first plug this in, all your computer sees is a small "CD-ROM" device that contains the U3 software and an autorun file. I have an old Sandisk Cruzer device that uses the infamous U3 encryption system.
You need to make sure that any erasure tool you use is designed to work with devices that use wear-levelling. This makes erasing these devices more complicated. However this does not apply to flash-memory based devices such as typical USB memory sticks.įlash memory devices use a concept known as wear-levelling, this means that some areas of storage will be rotated out of use and will not normally be accessible when using normal filesystem operations like writing a file. It is always a mistake to store personal data on the property of someone who you do not (or in future might not) wish to have access to your personal data.Ī note on overwriting USB devices that use Flash memory.įormatting any kind of storage device does not completely destroy data, it normally just recreates the filesystem structures without affecting much of the data contents.įor a hard disk, overwriting every data sector once with zeroes (or any character/octet) is sufficient to erase data. I have forgotten the password … unrecognised deviceĬrush it to small particles using a large hammer then buy your employer a new one (or ask them to deduct the replacement cost from your wages). How do I remove my personal data in the encrypted thumb drive?.