How to Erase Data From USB Drive or SD Card in Ubuntu

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How to Erase Data From USB Drive or SD Card in Ubuntu – Guide

Ubuntu has recently become one of the most sought after operating systems. Its free and open source availability as well as a powerful and sophisticated system that is less vulnerable and less error prone than its alternatives make it a very attractive option for users. In addition, Ubuntu also provides access to some very powerful built-in tools that allow users to perform actions efficiently and easily.

One of them is the ability to securely erase data from USB and SD cards. This is useful when a user wants to release up space on your external device or delete sensitive data that cannot be recovered under any circumstances. Given the widespread privacy issues these days, it’s even more important for you to know how to protect your data. So today we are going to explore various ways to safely delete your data from external storage devices in Ubuntu.

How to Erase data from USB drive or SD card in Ubuntu

Cleaning data using Disk Manager

Firstly, plug your USB drive or SD card into your PC and let it fully connect to your system. Open your Files folder and you will see a new icon in the left sidebar of the folder.

Then open your Ubuntu Dash and look for disks. Once you see the disks icon, click on it and launch it.

After launching the Disks utility, select the external device you want to wipe.

Now click on the Settings icon which is present in the Volumes section next to the minus sign. You will see several options available in the shrink menu. Click on Format Partition option. This can also be accessed by typing the following keyboard shortcut: Shift+Ctrl+F.

You will be prompted with a pop-up format window.up that will ask you to define up the volume name and file system type you want your USB or SD card to use after formatting. For type, it’s usually best to go with the default option.

Also, it is important that you click on the Erase button button. Once it says ON, click on Next found in the upper right corner.

Finally, a Confirm Details window will pop up which will confirm whether you want to format your external device or not. click on format Button in the upper right corner to proceed with the formatting process.

Clearing data using the command line

Firstly, open the terminal through Ubuntu Dash or shortcut Ctrl+Alt+T. Now check if your Ubuntu version already has parted installed, which is a pre-installed tool for manipulating partitions. This can be done by running the following command:

If your Ubuntu system does not have parted installed, you can install it by running the following commands:

$ sudo apt update

$ sudo apt install parted

It should be noted that the above command is only for Debian based systems like Ubuntu. For CentOS and Fedora users, parted can be installed by typing the following command in the terminal:

Then plug your USB drive or SD card into your PC and let it fully connect to your system. Type the following command in the terminal to get your device name:

$ lsblk

Here, all connected external devices will be shown. Examine each one closely and carefully choose the device you want to clean. In my case, the device is

Then, unmount the device by typing the following command in the terminal:

$ sudo umount /dev/sdb -l

Here you must enter your own device name in place of /dev/sdb.

Now we can finally clear the data from our external devices. This can be done by running the following command:

$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1k count=2048

What this does is completely replace all your data with zeros. Depending on the size of the device, it will take some time to complete.

That done, now we have to use the parted program to create a partition. First of all, eject your USB device or SD card and insert it again. Then type the following command in the terminal to create a partition:

$ sudo parted /dev/sdb mklabel msdos

Here you must enter your own device name in place of /dev/sdb.

Then you need to create an empty primary partition which will contain the Fat filesystem of our external device later. This can be done by running the following command:

$ sudo parted dev/sdb mkpart primary fat32 1MiB 100%

Here you must enter your own device name in place of /dev/sdb. This newly created partition will have the id /dev/sdb1.

Finally, type the following command to create a Fat file system partition on the /dev/sdb1 partition we created in Step 6:

$ sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb1

Here we are creating a fat filesystem on the /dev/sdb1 partition.

Final note

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