Deleting data from a corrupted USB storage device

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Hi All,

I have a SanDisk Cruzer Crossfire 1GB. It was working fine, but the other day my wife's work PC crashed - in the middle of backing up some data to the Cruzer. Ever since then, it has failed to work.

If I plug it into our home (XP) PC, it recognises the stick and it shows up fine in My Computer. If you try to explore it, you get a generic disk i/o error message, or sometimes it reports that the drive is not formatted. If you attempt to format it fails to complete.

Now, I got in touch with SanDisk tech support and they have agreed to replace the stick, which is great. So... I downloaded an App from Data Doctor Recovery, which was able to go in and identify most of the files on the stick. I have now backed these up. The problem is that I don't want to send back the stick as it is because it contains personal data. So, I'd like to 'wipe' the stick first.

Many hours of browsing the net later, I cannot find anything that'll do this. Most I have tried don't recognise the drive, or report i/o errors when attempting to write.

I have tried using Disk Admin in the PC management, but the relevant options (such as delete partition) are greyed out.

Can anyone help me please by suggesting a method I could use to wipe the drive. Seeing that the Data Doctor was able to ignore bad sectors and find files, I am assuming that it must be possible to have an app that ignores bad sectors and wipes good ones...

Any ideas/suggestions appreciated. I have to send the stick off ASAP.

Many thanks advance.
StuM
 
I was sure there was an option to delete files as well on Data Recovery Doctor... I could be wrong though. Most other recovery programs will also have a delete section...

Regards,

Korrupt
 
Thanks for that korrupt. I had another look and don't see an option - only the option to 'save' the data. It was the pen drive specific software I bought, so wonder if this only has limited functionality...

I will contact the vendor.

In the meantime, if you know of any decent freeware apps that would do what I need, please do shout.

Cheers
StuM
 
Further to my last posting, I contacted the software Vendor (Data Doctor) who say:

"You can not ‘wipe’ you data with our Data Recovery software. I suggest to format the Pen Drive and Copy any set of useless files in the pen drive until it is full. It’ll overwrite the Previously existing data and data may become impossible to recover."

Back to the drawing board :(

Cheers
StuM
 
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