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here's my story..

I got 3 SSD drives to test out some open source operating systems.. Since Ubuntu accepted my onboard RAID 0, I used the 2 SSD's with Ubuntu last to store data on, but first I installed BSD a couple times on them. I ended up having to find a freeware thing online which saved the two SSD's and I was able to run those two with my system now. However, I have one SSD left and I want to try booting from USBs as well, but I seem to run into the same problem with both the SSD's and USBs: no matter what I do Ubuntu keeps wanting to save something on those drives, call it "lost and found" (locked so I can't see what's in it), and that seems to be what's holding up my disks from being able to COMPETELY ERASE A HARD DRIVE WITH NOTHING NOTHING ON IT!!!!!!!!!!! NOTHING!!!!!!!! Just a fresh SSD and USB to reload the operating systems.. Both the SSD's and USB seem have the same problem finding a way to boot.. tand formatting but that doesn't dAnd the two SSD's that work can't not work without loading into the Grub screen (which I timed out to 0 seconds but it still shows up for a second)..

Thus far, I've tried Gparted, Disk Utility, Shred.. and some program online that was able to fix my solid state drives to load ubuntu on them, but I lost that.. I just want a bootable drive with NO GRUB whatsoever!!!!!! Just one whole disk with NO LEFTOVERS!!! That's it(why can't it be this easy?). I'm not worried about security or secure delete, I just want bootable disks, that's all.. How do I do this? I understand formatting but that doesn't do the trick either

for whatever reason, shredding, deleting partitions and reformatting doesn't actually erase everything.. I wanna know how to do this cause it seems you should be able to do this more easily..

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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Another option. Using a live USB, find your disk's device name using lsblk, and then run:

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

(from Paradoxical's answer, except that I was about to comment that bs=512 count=1 will suffice; I'm not sure why he deleted his answer)

This is the quickest way. It wipes out your disk's partition table, so it will appear to be empty to any basic scan. However, make sure that you get the correct device and that the disk is unmounted first.

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Thank you much for answering me!! If I may ask... I know what DD (I never got around to using it) is and I know /dev means device but may I ask what the rest is??? – The Dude Feb 13 at 14:29
This will only zero the first sector, not the whole drive. Drop the count argument to let it zero the whole drive. – psusi Feb 13 at 14:58
bs=512 count=1 writes one block of 512 bytes. 512 bytes is the size of the master boot record, which is all you need to do to wipe the pieces that refer to the rest of the disk. Your bootloader, filesystems and data will be there (and recovery tools may be able to get it back), but a normal system won't consider there to be anything present. – Robie Basak Feb 13 at 14:59
up vote 1 down vote

What's happening to you is that you're letting Ubuntu format the disk, and so it's putting a Linux filesystem on it. Linux filesystems tend to have a lost+found directory.

Delete partitions. Don't create any new partitions. Don't reformat. Let the other OS' installer do the formatting.

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