I’ve been messing with my flash drives trying to follow some random documentation with dd and now both of my flash drives are reporting 0 bytes of free space. I was trying to clear out everything and start from scratch as if they were new. I wonder if there are any program out there that can just sudo reset-everything /dev/sdX
Block devices are simply devices that hold data. That’s all. For a block device to be “formatted,” you typically want a partition table, a partition, and a filesystem in that partition.
For flash storage, the most common off-the-shelf solution is a DOS partition type with a single partition that occupies the entire storage, and a FAT32 filesystem.
On larger or more modern devices, you’ll typically see a GPT partition table with a single partition with exFAT. This setup allows you to store files larger than 4 GB.
You can simply use
fdiskto create or modify a partition table and create a partition. You’ll want to use a mkfs tool to create the filesystem.