Sometimes, shit just goes wrong, and you end up with a half-flashed drive that is totally unusable by your operating system. Some common graphical tools might even refuse to get it back to a normal state.

To solve these kinds of problems, we've collected a list of fail-proof methods to completely erase your drive in major operating systems.

Windows

In Windows, we'll use diskpart, a command line utility tool that comes pre-installed in all modern Windows versions.

• Open cmd.exe from either the list of all installed applications, or from the "Run..." dialog usually accessible by pressing Ctrl+X.
• Type diskpart.exe and press "Enter". You'll be asked to provide administrator permissions, and a new prompt window will appear. The following commands should be run in the new window.
• Run list disk to list the available drives. Take note of the number id that identifies the drive you want to clean.
• Run select disk N, where N corresponds to the id from the previous step.
• Run clean. This command will completely clean your drive by erasing any existent filesystem.
• Run create partition primary. This command will create a new partition.
• Run active. This command will active the partition.
• Run list partition. This command will show available partition.
• Run select partition N, where N corresponds to the id of the newly available partition.
• Run format override quick. This command will format the partition. You can choose a specific formatting by adding FS=xx where xx could be NTFS or FAT or FAT32 after format. Example : format FS=NTFS override quick
• Run exit to quit diskpart.

OS X Run the following command in Terminal.app, replacing N by the corresponding disk number, which you can find by running diskutil list:

diskutil eraseDisk FAT32 UNTITLED MBRFormat /dev/diskN

GNU/Linux Make sure the drive is unmounted (umount /dev/xxx), and run the following command as root, replacing xxx by your actual device path:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/xxx bs=512 count=1 conv=notrunc