Wipe any filesystem data and partitions from devices on Linux

wipefs should work in most cases to clean up filesystems.

# View filesystem data from a device
wipefs /dev/<my_device>

# Wipe any filesystem found
wipefs --all /dev/<my_device>

If wipefs can’t detect a filesystem, you can quickly wipe the header data of the device with dd.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<my_device> bs=1M count=100 oflag=direct,dsync status=progress

You may need to restart your machine for the OS to recognize the filesystem deletion, for instance if your device is an “LVM2_member”.

Also, as a last resort, you can completely wipe the device.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<my_device> bs=1M count=5000000 oflag=direct,dsync status=progress

To delete partitions, sgdisk should work well.

sgdisk --zap-all /dev/<my_device>