formatpartitioningusbusb-drive
How can I delete all data that is on stick?
For example I have this problem:
My stick has two partitions A (3.7 GB) and B (330 MB). How can I merge the two partitions in one and to delete all data that they contain?
I guess they have read-only properties… How can I force deleting them?
I see this in GParted:
You can clone from a drive to another drive with mkusb. Start via the graphical interface or with
dus /dev/sdx
where x is the device letter or the source in the cloning operation. The target will be selected in a safe way via menus.
ddgdisk.)After the cloning you can edit the partitions with gparted. If you touch only the casper-rw partition and the usbdata partition (amd if an MSDOS partition table the extended partition), booting will not be affected.
gparted.gparted and check that there are no lock symbols on /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb5./dev/sdb1 to the tail end (to the right)/dev/sdb1 to the left until the size is what you wantIf you cloned with dd you need to repair the backup partition table at the tail end of the drive with gdisk or maybe use gpt-fix.
Edit: gdisk command options cut from gpt-fix
echo \
"v
x
e
r
d
w
y" \
| gdisk "$1"
where "$1" should be replaced by the target device /dev/sdx, if run directly (not within the shellscript).
These command letters are explained in
man gdisk
The crucial commands are
in the expert's menu
e Move backup GPT data structures to the end of the disk. Use this
command if you've added disks to a RAID array, thus creating a
virtual disk with space that follows the backup GPT data struc‐
tures. This command moves the backup GPT data structures to the
end of the disk, where they belong.
and in the the recovery & transformation menu
d Use main GPT header and rebuild the backup. This option is
likely to be useful if the backup GPT header has been damaged or
destroyed.
The other commands are verifying, moving between menus and writing.
Unable to unmount a partition with GParted - is this a problem?
After cloning with mkusb, copying partitions from the original USB stick and booting from the new-larger stick, I'm unable to access the usbdata.
Please advice. Thanks!
Advice: Please post the output of the following command lines (when booted from the new-larger stick),
sudo lsblk -f
sudo lsblk -m
sudo ls -l /mountpoint-to-usbdata
sudo ls -l /mountpoint-to-casper-rw
where you enter the actual mountpoints to see usbdata and casper-rw.
This will help me understand what is the problem, so that I can suggest what to do next.
Please edit your original question to enter these output texts instead of here in my answer. Indent each line 4 characters in order to render the output as code. You can mark (high-light) the text and click on the {}
icon at the head of the editing window to make those indentations quickly.
Outputs of the four above-mentioned commands:
The command
sudo lsblk -f
gives the following results
The other one (sudo lsblk -m) outputs the following info:
The last two commands and results:
Best Answer
How to erase / delete / blank or wipe a disk
I’m sure there are other methods, but the one I prefer to use is the one that uses
ddto copy zeros, or random data in the file system I want to wipe.So, run this command if you want to erase your… let’s say microSD card.
Suppose it is mounted on
/dev/sdd1:If you do not want to wait too much, you can fill the partition with zeros instead of random data:
Both are secure, but IMHO the first one may be better, but of course I can be wrong.
Once again, be sure to double check, or better triple check on which partition you are going to apply this, you will not be warned by Linux, and the result can not be undone.
A good practice could be to first make an image of the disk and then wipe it. If you want to proceed that way, do this.
Then wipe it
You can then recover the data by doing
Info taken from this site.