- How can I completely erase all data on a (micro) SD card?
- 4 Answers 4
- How to secure wipe USB drive, SD card on Ubuntu
- How do I permanently mount a USB drive in Linux?
- Does formatting a drive wipe it?
- Can SD cards be tracked?
- How do I shred in Linux?
- Does installing Linux wipe hard drive?
- How do I wipe my hard drive Arch Linux?
- Does Secure Erase remove operating system?
- Is 7 pass erase secure enough?
- How do I wipe my hard drive before recycling?
- How to Format a USB or SD Card in Ubuntu Linux
- Format USB disks on Ubuntu & other Linux distributions
- Troubleshooting when you cannot format the USB disk on Ubuntu Linux
- Step 1:
- Step 2:
- Step 3:
- Step 4:
- Step 5:
How can I completely erase all data on a (micro) SD card?
I just got a micro sd card that I plan on using with the Raspberry Pi. I used the KDE partition manager to delete the original partition on the card and to write a new 12GiB ext4 partition. After doing this, the card still says that 6% of it, 30.02 MiB, is being used. Basically, I want to completely wipe of the card of all contents so as to prepare it for a new OS. Would a command like shred or dd do the trick or would that destroy the partition as well?
I am biased, but if you want full control of partitions, don’t use graphical partitioning, use the good old fdisk . (Unless you can’t because of GPT or other technical restrictions.)
By the way. does RaspberryPi support loading the kernel from ext4 directly? I remember using FAT for the early boot process (kernel, cmdline, SoC configuration and memory split), and then having the root filesystem on another partition (or NFS if you like)
[Securely wipe disk — archlinux.org] «Wiping a disk is done by writing new data over every single bit.» wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Securely_wipe_disk
4 Answers 4
Your guessing about dd is right. You can wipe the SD card out by the following command (let’s assume, that your SD card is /dev/sdd ):
Do not interrupt this command or it could possibly brick the SD card.
$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdd bs=8192
Note: If this command does not complete successfully and you have to abort it, then most likely it is recoverable with disk partition recovery programs covered in other posts.
It can take some time depending on size and speed of SD card. If you are convinced, that CIA would like to recover your files, then overwrite the SD card with urandom instead of zero :
$ sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdd bs=8192
dd command from above examples will erase whole SD card, leaving it without any partitions, even with no partition table. So you will need to recreate partition on SD card. You can do this by any partitioning tool like cfdisk , parted (my recommendation) or gparted .
And one more thing: be extremely careful when calling dd command. A typo in of= argument value can cause disaster.
How to secure wipe USB drive, SD card on Ubuntu
The cheapest way to tackle a pile of hard drives is to wipe them with a software eraser. I will warn you though: it’s not quick, and it won’t work on defective disks. My tool of choice for wiping drives is Darik’s Boot And Nuke. It’s free and does an excellent job of wiping drives clean.
How do I permanently mount a USB drive in Linux?
- Step 1: Plug-in USB drive to your PC.
- Step 2 – Detecting USB Drive. After you plug in your USB device to your Linux system USB port, It will add new block device into /dev/ directory. .
- Step 3 – Creating Mount Point. .
- Step 4 – Delete a Directory in USB. .
- Step 5 – Formatting the USB.
Does formatting a drive wipe it?
Formatting a disk does not erase the data on the disk, only the address tables. . As long as people understand that formatting is not a 100 percent secure way to completely remove all data from your computer, then they are able to make the choice between formatting and even more secure methods.
Can SD cards be tracked?
Nope. it like a coin, can’t trace it.
How do I shred in Linux?
To shred a single file, we can use the following command. The options we are using are: u: Deallocate and remove the file after overwriting. v: Verbose option, so that shred tells us what it is doing.
Does installing Linux wipe hard drive?
Short answer, yes linux will delete all the files on your hard drive so No it will not put them into a windows. back or similar file. . basically,you need a clean partition to install linux(this goes for every OS).
How do I wipe my hard drive Arch Linux?
If you want to wipe the entire disk, you can use parted and the ‘mktable gpt’ or ‘mktable msdos’ which will create a new partition and non securely erase everything. If you just want to wipe selected partitions, just run mkfs. fstype (like mkfs. ext4 or mkfs.
Does Secure Erase remove operating system?
Using a tool like DBAN erases the hard drive completely. It’s easy, and every single bit of every single byte — operating system, settings, programs, and data — is removed from the hard drive… . Then, if you like (and if you can), reinstall the operating system from an install disk.
Is 7 pass erase secure enough?
It’s still possible to recover the data from the drive. A 7-pass erasure using random data will do a pretty complete job to prevent reconstruction of the data on the drive. . They took a drive, ran it through a pass of all zeros, and hired a data recovery firm to try and recover what they could.
How do I wipe my hard drive before recycling?
To do so, connect the drive to your computer, right-click it in Windows Explorer or File Explorer, and select Format. Be sure to uncheck the Quick Format box to perform a full format— a quick format won’t fully erase the deleted files from your drive. Repeat this process for each drive you want to wipe.
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How to Format a USB or SD Card in Ubuntu Linux
Formatting removable media like a USB disk or an SD card is a pretty simple task on Ubuntu Linux. No, I won’t be using the terminal here although you can always use the command line on Linux. I’m going to show you how to format a USB on Ubuntu or other Linux distributions graphically.
Format USB disks on Ubuntu & other Linux distributions
I’m using Ubuntu with the GNOME desktop environment in this tutorial, but it should be applicable to other Linux distributions and other desktop environments as well.
Plug in your USB or SD card. Now go to the File manager. You should see your USB or SD Card here.
Right click on it and you should see the format option.
When you hit the format option, it will give you the option to name the device and choose the filesystem.
When you’ve selected the appropriate options, hit the Next button in the top right corner.
You’ll see a warning that all the data on the USB disk/SD card will be erased. That’s obvious.
Just hit the format button in the top right corner.
Your USB disk will be formatted in a few seconds or a couple of minutes at the most.
Once it’s formatted, you’ll see that it has reappeared in the file manager with the new name you gave it.
That’s it. That’s the standard way of formatting a USB drive on Ubuntu Linux.
Troubleshooting when you cannot format the USB disk on Ubuntu Linux
I never thought I would have trouble formatting a simple SD card or USB/pen drive until I encountered this problem on Ubuntu. When I looked at the options available by right clicking on the mounted removable disk, I found none for formatting.
So I tried using the default disk utility of Ubuntu: Disks. But it failed and gave me the following error:
Error formatting disk – Error synchronizing after initial wipe: Timed out waiting for object (udisks-error-quark, 0)
The above mentioned error is a known bug which has been unresolved for months – despite this, Disks is still being served as the default disk utility program (why?).
I had to go around and format the removable disk with the help of GParted. And thus I came up with this tutorial to help others learn how to format a SD card or USB key in Ubuntu.
Step 1:
Install GParted. It’s a free and open source partition manager for Linux. You can install it using the terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):
sudo apt-get install gparted
Step 2:
Insert the SD card or USB key. Now launch GParted. To do that, go to the Unity dash and search for GParted. It takes some time to search for all the disks present on the system. Have some patience. When it’s recognized the drives, you’ll see a screen as below. By default it goes to the hard drive of your computer. To access removable media, go to the top-right corner of the application and choose the removable media. You can see the size of the removable media to identify the right one :
Step 3:
Now you’ll see a screen like the one below. This shows the partitions of the removable disk. Before you go for formatting, unmount the disk by right-clicking on the partition in the following manner:
Step 4:
Once you have it unmounted, right-clicking on it will show you the Format To option. You can choose whatever type of file system you want on the disk. Once you’ve selected the drive to format, click on the Tick sign at the top to start the process:
Step 5:
Nothing more needs to be done now. You will see a couple of warnings and then the format procedure will start.
There is another possible formatting related issue. I’ve written another tutorial to fix this ‘error formatting volume’ issue in Ubuntu.
Was the tutorial helpful to you and were you able to format a USB key in Ubuntu? Any questions? Feel free to go to the comments section of the page.