My company has issued an encrypted USB flash drive which I stored my personal data in it. How do I remove my personal data in the encrypted thumb drive? As @jehad mentioned, use gparted utility. It is an open-source utility for disk managment, supporting a bunch of file systems.You didn't mention what OS are you using — for most of them you can get it with package manager. Otherwise, you can, burn it to a disk, and boot from it.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. Note, that theoretically it is still possible to restore the data, in this case you can use something like dd utility, but you have to mention specifically if that's the case.
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Since you're using Windows 10, you might be able to use DiskPart, depending on how the encryption works. If the flash drive doesn't even present the encrypted partition's storage space to the OS without unlocking it via some special low-level mechanism, then the only thing you can do is physical destruction, but this might help somebody:. Run diskpart. Type list disk to see the disks available to Windows. Type select disk N, where N is the number of the flash drive, e.g. Select disk 2 if it was listed as Disk 2 in the previous step. Be very careful that you get the right drive, otherwise you'll blow away something important in the next step.
Type clean all to scribble over every sector of the drive with zeroes. If your data destroyer can handle the drive now, you can stop following these steps.
If it needs a normal volume, read on. Do list disk again to see the amount of free space the drive now has. Run create partition primary size=N where N is the free space in megabytes. Type list partition to see the ID of the new partition (it's probably 1).
Type select partition N where N is the partition number you just got. Type format fs=ntfs quick to create a new NTFS volume. Exit DiskPart with exit. Use your data destroyer of choice to obliterate any chance of recovering the data that was under the space now occupied by this new partition. IMHO there's no need for a Linux disk or similar.
If you can see the Exe on the USB stick, the USB stick has already been mounted.In that case you can:. Go into Windows' disk partition management ( diskmgmt.msc). Delete all partitions on the USB stick (there might be some without drive letter). Create a new single partition that uses all USB disk space. Use to wipe all disk spaceDue to the nature of Flash memory, some data may remain on the disk, but if I understood you correctly, the data was encrypted anyway, so there should not be something that can be recovered.
At the company I work at, we use similar encrypted USB keys to transfer data.The drive contains a partition which presents itself as being an optical drive. What type of disk? If it's like an IronKey, where the drive renders itself unreadable after a number of failed attempts, you can just enter an incorrect password enough times to trigger the self-destruct mechanism.If it's just a standard encrypted drive, one where you chose the encryption password and no other password will unlock it, no problem. If you don't know the password, they don't know it either - so the data on it is secure even if you do turn it in.If it has multiple passwords (e.g. Like my work computer, where more than one user has a password that will unlock the full-disk encryption), in that case (and in that case ONLY) should you consider physically destroying the drive.