SanDisk microSD Product Manual tells it's an intrinsic function in their products. If you're still unsatisfied by this technique because there's a small probability that (a) a meaningful chunk of data survives and (b) the adversary will be able to read it out and (c) decrypt it, consider that physical destruction may not destroy the data definitely: there will be a chance that one night you will sleepwalk to a potential adversary and sleeptalk the data to them.Įdit addressing some of the comments: consumer-grade flash storage does have over-provisioning, e.g. Repeat the last process until you have successfully deleted all the partitions.Next time you're about to put sensitive data on a flash drive, consider encrypting it first! Strongly encrypted data is useless without the key, and if you securely erase the drive first, all that will be left is an occasional sector of such encrypted data surviving due to wear leveling. Once you hit the Enter button, the selected partition will be deleted from the drive.Thus, you should type "delete partition 1" or "delete partition 2". Type "delete partition #" (# can be 1 or 2 or 3) if there are three partitions, you will see partition 1, partition 2, and partition 3. You will see all the available partitions on your USB drive.(Note: (f) is the drive name of your USB drive it can be any letter, so make sure you know your flash drive's letter.)
Now, type "select disk f" and press the Enter key.Type "list disk" to display all the available drives on your computer.Press Windows key + R and type "diskpart", then hit the enter button.When you encounter such scenarios, Diskpart is another effective, built-in Windows utility to try out.īut it is recommended that you create a backup file or an image file to safeguard everything that is saved on the USB drive. Sometimes, you will notice that the "Delete Volume" option on the Disk Management context menu is unavailable, making it impossible for you to delete the partitions on your USB drive. Using Diskpart to delete partitions on a USB drive Continue in this manner until you’ve successfully deleted all partitions on the flash drive. Right-click on each of the partitions, and select "Delete Partition".Click on the USB/flash drive to view all partitions it has.Go to “Disk Management” by pressing Windows key + R and typing “diskmgmt.msc”.Log in to the computer as an administrator.How to remove partitions from USB with Disk Managementĭisk Management helps for a lot of actions that require modifying a drive’s properties or expanding available space.