In Linux, how do you delete the partition table from a disk?

Question

In Linux, how would I go about removing the GPT or MBR partition table on a disk? To be clear, I don't want to immediately format with a new partition table, I want to be able to remove the partition table completely.

Solution

You can just write some zeros to the first sector of the disk in question, for example you want to erase partition table of sda:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1  

That would fill first 512 bytes of the disk with zeros, and in effect erase the partition table.

Comments

[sawdust]

You have the block size and count numbers swapped.

[SparedWhisle]

yeah. but I think either way should work, only bs=512 is better?

[sawdust]

If you're convinced that your original answer is good, then you should have left it alone.