Solved: Samsung Magician Secure Erase USB Not Working

About Samsung Magician software

Samsung has produced many SSD drives with high performance. And it also updates two pieces of main useful software to help users manage Samsung branded SSDs. One is Samsung Data Migration, helping users to transfer data from a HDD or SSD to a Samsung SSD drive.

Another one is Samsung Magician software, which can help users to test SSD performance, optimize SSD performance, and update their firmware, most importantly, allows users to secure erase Samsung SSD drive.

How do you secure erase Samsung SSD via Samsung Magician?

To erase Samsung SSD securely via Samsung Magician Secure Erase, you need to take the following steps.

Warning: verify that the firmware of the SSD is updated to the latest version before running Samsung Magician Secure Erase.

Step 1. Download Samsung Magician and then a USB stick, click the “START” button in the bottom left of your screen and type “Samsung Magician” then select the first result.

Step 2. Click the “Secure Erase” tab at the bottom of the window.

Step 3. Click “Browse” and choose the USB drive you will use to create a bootable USB drive and click “OK”.

Step 4. A warning will appear to inform you that all data on the USB drive will be gone after being a bootable media. Click “YES” if you don’t care about anything saved on it or you have made a backup before.

Step 5. Then the process to create bootable USB drive will begin, please don’t perform other tasks during this process.

Step 6. When you see a "Success" message, you can click “YES” and restart the computer. Boot your computer from the bootable USB, press F8 or other specific key according to your motherboard manufacturer while the system is booting to enter the boot selection menu.

Step 7. Then you will see Samsung Magician Secure Erase splash screen. Press “Y” on your keyboard to proceed. The tool will scan all drives, choose the Samsung SSD drive you plan to erase, and press “Y” on your keyboard to proceed.

Step 8. Secure erase will process then present the message “Secure Erase is Successful”.

What to do when Samsung Magician secure erase USB not working?

From the content above, we can know this method involves too many steps, and creating a bootable USB is a necessary one. The more steps, the easier to trigger problem. For example, some users report that sometimes Samsung Magician secure erase USB does not work as expected, Samsung Magician Secure Erase failed to create bootable USB, cannot boot from Samsung Magician USB, or Samsung Magician is unable to find a Samsung SSD.

If your computer cannot boot from the Samsung Magician Secure Erase USB drive, you can first verify that the USB drive is in the first position of the boot order (restart your computer and enter BIOS setup). Sometimes, you also need to change boot mode. Besides, you need to pay attention to the following factors when Samsung Magician bootable USB does not work:

★The bootable USB will not work with devices attached via SATA 6Gbps (SATA III) operating in IDE mode.

★The AHCI or ATA mode must be enabled in BIOS during PC boot up.

★While making a bootable USB for secure erase, please close the Device Manager.

★The bootable USB might not work if the SSD is removed on PC that does not support the hot plug feature.

Besides that, Samsung Magician has some other limitations. For example, it does not work with SSDs connected via the SCSI controller interface, or locked with a user password. If you are using any custom storage driver, then Samsung Magician won’t work properly. So you need to apply the latest storage driver or Microsoft driver.

Best workaround to Samsung Magician USB not working

Since the Samsung Magician secure erase USB not working can be caused by many issues, it will be time-consuming to figure out the exact reason and corresponding fix. So why not find an alternative to Samsung Magician, which can erase all data on Samsung SSD in a much easier way? Here we highly recommend AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional (Windows 11/10/8/8.1/7/XP/Vista supported). It can be the best workaround when Samsung Magician bootable USB not working.

Compared with Samsung Magician Secure erase, it does not require you to create a bootable USB drive. It can not only erase Samsung SSD drives but also other branded Solid State Drives. Moreover, it can also wipe HDD, flash drive, SD card clean through Fill sectors with Zero, Fill sectors with random data, DoD 5220.22-M and Gutmann. You can download the Demo version and have a try.

Attention: since this SSD secure erase feature only works on Windows 7 by far, so please connect the Samsung SSD drive you want to erase to a Windows 7 computer.

Step 1. Install and run this Samsung Magician alternative. In the main interface, right-click the Samsung SSD drive and select "SSD Secure Erase". It will pop out a notice for the operation, after reading it, click Next.

Step 2. Select the Samsung SSD that you want to securely erase and click Next.

Step 3. Double-check the SSD identification information in case you erase the wrong SSD.

Step 4. When you click “Next”, you might find the SSD is in a frozen state. To continue, you need to perform a hot-swap.

To perform a Hot Swap:
First, open computer case, rear cover or drive shell and find out the SSD you’ll erase.
Second, unplug the power cable and then disconnect the SATA data cable from SSD.
Finally, after a few seconds, reconnect the SATA cable to the SATA port and then plug the power cable back to complete the hot-swap.

Step 5. After performing a hot swap, now you can click "Next" to start the SSD Secure Erase and wait till the process finished.

Summary

When the “Samsung Magician Secure Erase USB not working” issue occurs to you, you can try to fix provided above, or turn to AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro. Besides securely erasing all branded SSD drive, it can also help optimize SSD performance by making 4k alignment, migrate OS to SSD drive, recover deleted partitions on SSD drive or recover lost files from SSD. If you are running Windows Server 2019/2016/2012/2008/2003, you can try AOMEI Partition Assistant Server.