!!!! don't do this - for example only !!!!!

To break the USB thumbdrive, we want to overwrite the first 512 bytes of the drive with zeros with the following command (drive should NOT be mounted) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 Now if we run the command

fdisk -l /dev/sda

this shows us that there are no partitions defined on the drive. In reality, the filesystems and all of their data is still intact, the drive just has no information about where they reside.