I recently used a flash drive to try MeeGo on my netbook. Unfortunately, the application I used to write MeeGo to the flash drive created a new partition in a rather unusual format. The Ubuntu disk utility can't delete the partition, and GParted can't even see it. How can I completely wipe the flash drive from Ubuntu? I'd prefer not to install any additional software.
Linux – How to wipe a flash drive from Linux
linuxpartitioningUbuntuusb-flash-drivewipe
Best Answer
Have you tried
fdisk
? In a terminal, runwhere
/dev/sdx
should be replaced with the device file for your flash drive. Once you getfdisk
open, typep
to list the partition table, and if the mysterious partition is listed, you can used #
to delete it. (#
is the number of the partition, so e.g.d 1
,d 2
)w
writes the partition table back to the disk andq
quits. (hitm
for help)If even
fdisk
fails, I guess you could just try zeroing out the first sector, which I think contains the partition table.where, again,
/dev/sdx
should be replaced with the actual device for your flash drive, will do that for you. You can increase thecount=
number to write zeros to more of the disk, or omit it entirely to overwrite the entire disk. Needless to say, if you do this, you irretrievably lose any files that may have been stored on the disk.