I want to thoroughly format a pendrive which seems to have residual partitioning structures on it. I know I had created and deleted them. Now, after I crated a live disk on it, it gives me a grub error message which probably means that there is some boot sector or similar left from before which I do not see.
Any way to completely Earase the stick?
Load the pendrive into GParted and delete everything “manually”. Then reformat.
+1 to GParted. I'd recommend performing the destructive operation of creating a new msdos partition table, this'll wipe out the entire drive's partitions and master boot record.
The alternate is to zero wipe the flash drive (but this increases wear on the flash memory)
In the Disks utility, you can perform a zero wipe when formatting the drive:
Or alternately from the terminal:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX
(where /dev/sdX is the drive, you can confirm in fdisk -l)