Anadense Posted November 9, 2015 Share Posted November 9, 2015 Need to be able to wipe flash drives, SD cards, etc. Family and friends need a drive/card and I've got one to spare, or something like that, but I don't want them being able to get any of my stuff. Also just for when the drive is too small/too old/slow and glitching a bit and it's time to recycle it. Seems like a place identity theft would occur. REALLY not expecting anything from this, because all I've gotten in response is how it's all proprietary/really difficult(not exactly sure how much I trust the scale of difficulty described from those people, given that there are multiple apps for Windows Phone that basically do the same thing in order to get rid of the mysterious "Other" data), but it can't hurt to ask Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Augeas Posted November 9, 2015 Moderators Share Posted November 9, 2015 I'm not sure that I've grasped this correctly, but why don't you use Drive Wiper? We know that Nand flash can't be overwritten as such, but a Drive Wipe will cause the flash controller to remap all the pages being 'wiped'. This will place those pages beyond the reach of anyone. Of course one could rip the internals from the drive, plug in some fancy device and read the chips directly, but they will most likely have been encrypted by the drive controller, and your family aren't going to do that anyway, are they? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators mta Posted November 9, 2015 Moderators Share Posted November 9, 2015 What about a WIndows low-level format? The size in GiB of the medium wouldn't be too big to make the format take that long. Just a question of exactly how a low-level format gets done on NAND storage. Follow a low-level format with a Recuva would answer that. Backup now & backup often.It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Augeas Posted November 10, 2015 Moderators Share Posted November 10, 2015 Out of curiosity I Drive Wiped (erased) a small FAT12 card and Recuva deep scan returns zilch. That'll do me, and any nosey relatives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Nergal Posted November 10, 2015 Moderators Share Posted November 10, 2015 Out of curiosity I Drive Wiped (erased) a small FAT12 card and Recuva deep scan returns zilch. That'll do me, and any nosey relatives.Wait what? FAT12: The oldest type of FAT uses a 12-bit binary number to hold the cluster number. A volume formatted using FAT12 can hold a maximum of 4,086 clusters, which is 2^12 minus a few values (to allow for reserved values to be used in the FAT). FAT12 is therefore most suitable for very small volumes, and is used on floppy disks and hard disk partitions smaller than about 16 MB (the latter being rare today.) http://pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/partSizes-c.html ADVICE FOR USING CCleaner'S REGISTRY INTEGRITY SECTION DON'T JUST CLEAN EVERYTHING THAT'S CHECKED OFF. Do your Registry Cleaning in small bits (at the very least Check-mark by Check-mark) ALWAYS BACKUP THE ENTRY, YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU'LL BREAK IF YOU DON'T. Support at https://support.ccleaner.com/s/?language=en_US Pro users file a PRIORITY SUPPORT via email support@ccleaner.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators mta Posted November 10, 2015 Moderators Share Posted November 10, 2015 maybe a typo, FAT32 instead of FAT12. (to be honest, I had never heard of FAT12 until your link @Nergal so if nothing else, I learnt something today) Backup now & backup often.It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Nergal Posted November 10, 2015 Moderators Share Posted November 10, 2015 maybe a typo, FAT32 instead of FAT12. (to be honest, I had never heard of FAT12 until your link @Nergal so if nothing else, I learnt something today) Me too, now I want to format something fat12 and see if windows64 can even read it ADVICE FOR USING CCleaner'S REGISTRY INTEGRITY SECTION DON'T JUST CLEAN EVERYTHING THAT'S CHECKED OFF. Do your Registry Cleaning in small bits (at the very least Check-mark by Check-mark) ALWAYS BACKUP THE ENTRY, YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU'LL BREAK IF YOU DON'T. Support at https://support.ccleaner.com/s/?language=en_US Pro users file a PRIORITY SUPPORT via email support@ccleaner.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Augeas Posted November 10, 2015 Moderators Share Posted November 10, 2015 Come on, you know I never make a mistake. It's a 16mb xD card that came with the camera some years ago, probably the smallest card they could get away with and still have the camera working. It's FAT12, of course. It works fine, and I can use it when I need to try any flash stuff, like running Drive Wiper. It doesn't hold many pics, though. FAT32 is just FAT16 stretched a little, and FAT16 is FAT12 tarted up somewhat. In fact FAT32 still uses the same two-byte FAT address field in directories as FAT12: the other two bytes are held elsewhere and joined together when retrieved. Recuva (and Win 8) still formats the card to FAT12 quite happily when doing a Drive Wipe full erase. Don't you love backwards compatibility to a forty-year-old file system? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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