Skip to main content

DiskPart for Cleaning Flash Drives

I often like to play around with new and different Linux distros as I am building my experience in computer and phone forensics. Mostly to see what they are like and how they could be of any use to me either now or in the future. One thing that I have found is that in doing so I have to utilize different forms of creating the bootable media, typically a USB Flash Drive. In doing so I often find that depending on how the media was created, doing a simple Windows format of the drive isn't enough to properly clean it for use with something else. Typically hidden files/folders can be left on the device, and sometimes the bootable flash drive creation process can partition the flash drive and the Windows GUI only sees one of the two partitions. Windows does have a command based tool that enables better management of drives called DiskPart (Check out their TechNet Article Here for more details). I'm going to go through a quick walk through on how to clean and format a flash drive using the DiskPart tool. One note of caution.....If you select the wrong Disk Number at the beginning of this process you could end up formatting either your primary HD or any other device connected to your PC. I recommend that you only have one flash or external HD connected to your PC when you go through this. So with that said, here we go:


  1. Open an Administrative Command Prompt
  2. Enter commands
    1. diskpart
      1. Starts the tool
    2. list disk
      1. Lists the disks that are available, you should see two 
    3. select disk <number>
      1. Where Number is the number of your USB disk, this should be the smaller of the two in size
    4. Clean
      1. This removes any existing partitions from the USB disk, including any hidden sectors
    5. Create Partition Primary
      1. Creates a new primary partition with default parameters
    6. Select Partition 1
      1. Focus on the newly created partition
    7. Active
      1. Sets the in-focus partition to active, informing the disk firmware that this is a valid system partition
    8. Format FS=<FAT, FAT32, NTFS>
      1. Select the drive file system format you want the drive to be formatted to. Typically you will use FAT or FAT32 depending on the size of the flash drive
      2. This may take some time depending on the size of the flash drive as well.
    9. Assign
    10. Exit
      1. Quits the DiskPart tool
  3. Type "exit" again to quit the command prompt or hit the red X
Now your flash drive is squeaky clean the via the Windows way. You should be able to create your bootable media without issues, or use the drive for something else.

Here's a picture in case you're not familiar with this:


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Visio Stencils Pack for Azure and Microsoft Integration (v5.0.0)

First off, I'd like to send a big shout out to Sandro Pereira who's been managing the vision stencils pack. Essentially, I'm re-posting his information here, because I had a really hard time finding the latest Visio pack for Azure, that wasn't a bunch of SVG's. My thought is that if more people re-post, maybe the search engines of the internet will have an easier time propagating the information... Sandero's Blog (the original post around the new stencils): https://blog.sandro-pereira.com/2019/10/18/microsoft-integration-and-azure-stencils-pack-for-visio-new-major-version-available-v5-0-0/ Sandero's GitHub: https://github.com/sandroasp/Microsoft-Integration-and-Azure-Stencils-Pack-for-Visio Microsoft TechNet Download: https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Collection-of-Integration-e6a3f4d0 I will say, and maybe it's just because I'm using Visio 2013, each icon has a boarder that needs to be removed when putting it on the page... Likely it...
Post a Comment
Read more

Using Python for GPG/PGP File Encryption - Part 1

So, this will be the start of a series that will build a python script for GPG/PGP file encryption. In this post, we'll look at installing gnupg for python and using python to setup the keystore, create a private key, exporting the associated public key, and importing a public key. Now everything done here can be done with simple gnupg commands, but learning how to do this with python will help in understanding the script we'll be building to complete file encryption. I will be covering non-python gnupg commands in a future post. Additionally, the folks at the python-gnupg site over at pythonhosted.org have done a really great job at documenting everything (link to their site at the bottom). The stuff I'll be going over will be more of a start-to-finish for anyone that may get lost in the muck of doing stuff with python. Full Disclosure #1: Any key identifier throughout the series of posts is FICTITIOUS and DOES NOT represent any real key, either associated with myself or...
1 comment
Read more

Windows Server 2008: Log on as batch job

From time to time, I have to set up some scheduled tasks that required a dedicated account to run. And when doing so, I'll usually forget that the dedicated account usually isn't given any more permissions than what it needs to complete the task at hand. So, after setting up the task, Windows will usually yell at me and say "The account needs batch job rights". So here's how to grant batch job permissions on your server. Go to your start menu, and start searching for Local Security Policy In the left pane of the MMC that opens up, expand Local Policies, and highlight User Rights Assignment. Now, in the left right pane, locate "Log on as a batch job" and double click it. In the properties window that opens up, add the user or group that needs this permission. I find that if you have multiple service accounts running different tasks on the same server, it's easier to just add a group verses the individual a...
Post a Comment
Read more