Ubuntu – How to delete all partion of the pen drive and create a single volume

If you are completely, positively, SURE that you want to erase the current contents of your pen drive, then you can try the dd command as described below.

First, check one last time that /dev/sdb refers to the pen drive you want to erase. As another answer has pointed out, you want to have no doubt that you are erasing the correct device. (I would probably run the command sudo fdisk -l as an extra check.)

The dd command below should write zeros to the first MiB of the pen drive which will erase any partition table. This should completely remove any partitioning.

sudo dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1 of=/dev/sdb

If you decide you want to write zeros to the entire device, just omit the count=1 parameter. This will take longer, of course. How much longer depends on the size of the pen drive you are erasing.

sudo dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M of=/dev/sdb

After you have erased the partition table with zeros, you can partition the drive. I would do this using gparted simply because I am familiar with that tool and know how to use it.

Here is how I would do it.

• If gparted is not already available on your system, install it. You could, for example, use the command below.
  sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y install gparted
• Start gparted, entering your password when it is requested.
• Perform the following steps.
  1. Select the pen drive as the current gparted device.
  2. Select the free space region on the pen drive.
  3. Select Create Partition Table in the Device menu and create an MS-DOS style partition table.
  4. Select New in the Partition menu to create a new primary partition on the pen drive. Or if you prefer, you could close gparted at this point and use fdisk to partition the pen drive.

Note:

If you wanted to do this in Windows I suggest using the DISKPART command in a command window. Once in DISKPART select the correct disk and then issue the command CLEAN.

(You can issue the command HELP CLEAN while in DISKPART form more information about what the command does.)

You might try zeroing out the drive as mentioned in the comments by running...

# dd count=1 bs=512 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx && sync

... where sdx is the drive you're wanting to format.

BE VERY CAREFUL TO ENSURE THAT YOU ARE DOING THIS AGAINST THE RIGHT DRIVE!

Then create a new partition table...

# cfdisk /dev/sdx
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdx1
# e2label /dev/sdx1 USB_STICK

This combined with running gparted with...

gksudo gparted

...worked for me. I had a USB stick that I dd'd an iso on to ot use for booting then had trouble recovering it. These were the steps I took and it as usable again.