How can I wipe a flash drive from Linux?

Question

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.

Answer 1

Have you tried fdisk? In a terminal, run

sudo fdisk /dev/sdx

where /dev/sdx should be replaced with the device file for your flash drive. Once you get fdisk open, type p to list the partition table, and if the mysterious partition is listed, you can use d # 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 and q quits. (hit m for help)

If even fdisk fails, I guess you could just try zeroing out the first sector, which I think contains the partition table.

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=512 count=1

where, again, /dev/sdx should be replaced with the actual device for your flash drive, will do that for you. You can increase the count= number to write zeros to more of the disk.