Help - Erasing SD Card before sending back to SanDisk

[thewatrb0y]

I have spoken to SanDisk and have an RMA to send my 64 GB SanDisk Ultra Micro SD card back for a replacement.

I have tried pretty much everything I can... I have roughly 35GB of assorted Pictures, Movies, Music, and Videos on my SD card that I need to send back to SanDisk. I have no option to "Delete" anything thru windows. I've tried thru Dos and it tells me every file is dirty. I also get the file is locked. I've been able to overwrite the data and delete it thru my phone but it just reappears when the device is restarted. It's almost like all of the files are imprinted on the card and there is nothing that can be done.

Anyway, I've searched high and dry thru google and I've had no luck.

There are some pictures and other files on the SD Card that I would like others not to see, is there a way that I may not have tried to either delete these files or somehow corrupt the files? My laptop didn't recognize the SD card and wanted to format the remaining 25 GB but never got off of zero. Everything I run tells me the drive is dirty with the exception of CHKDSK



I guess if there's nothing I can do, does anyone know what SanDisk or other card companies do with returns like mine? Do they "test" or "review" the card and possibly look at what's on the card? Do they just toss it?

 

[Vsweety]

Many of the 64 GB cards suck. As you found out. If you can't re-format one that's just a real life demo of how bad the card is.

If there's something on the card you don't want third parties to see there is only one thing you can do, and that is physically destroying the card. Thoroughly!

FYI: when the space shuttle slammed into the ground at 1700 mph there was a 200 GB multi-glass platter hard disk on board that was obviously in smithereens. Many thousands of tiny slivers of fragments distributed over a 100 square mile area. It took 'm a few years, but eventually they managed to recover 80% of the data on it...
That was 6 years ago.
Your storage medium, a SAN micro SD card, is solid state. Not glass. And is consequently ever so much more indestructible! If you want to physically destroy it, and its data, beyond ressurrection, I would want to have a steam roller rolling over it a half dozen times, minimum, or mangle it in a car crusher, or duct tape it to a train rail bar, or dissolve it in acid.

 

[Rukbat]

Download GPartEd. Burn it to a CD. Boot your computer with the CD. Mount the card in a card reader and put it into the computer. Tell GPartEd to delete the partition the pictures, etc., are in. Create an ext4 partition on the whole card, and format it. Even the NSA couldn't recover anything from that. (From a hard drive, maybe, if they wanted to burn money by the carload. But not from an SD card.)

If that doesn't work, SanDisk won't be able to read the card unless it's a bad controller and they take the memory chip out and read it raw. And they don't waste their time doing that. If the controller is bad, the card is recoverable silicon metal and a few milligrams of gold, not an SD card. (I've worked on customer data - even some that was, shall we say, NSFW. I had a job to do and I did it. If someone had a gif of what happened when they sat on the Xerox machine wearing less than they should have been, I didn't have time to look at it, I had data to work on. And it's the same thing with companies like SanDisk. Someone has to verify that the incoming cards are bad. Wasting an hour going through your card to grab "interesting" pictures is a good way to become an ex-employee when they want to know why you only got though 4 cards all day. Considering that even the US Army is "laying people off", no one is going to risk extended unemployment for a few pictures.

 

[dctokyo]

you can format the card on your PC using Diskpart