Restore bootable USB flash drive to normal

Question

I’m trying to create a persistent installation of Parrot OS on my 16GB USB flash drive. I made the mistake of making the USB flash drive bootable without partitioning the drive into 2 in the beginning. Now I am unable to revert the USB flash drive back to normal.

I am using macOS. When I open Disk Utility the USB flash drive is only recognized as 701KB and I am unable to erase it using the diskutil in the command line since it gives the error:

The chosen size is not valid for the chosen file system.

Any help is greatly appreciated, thank you.

Solution

I found a similar post on Stack Overflow where someone had the same problem and just ran this diskutil command from the command line:

diskutil zeroDisk /dev/disk2

Such a simple fix, so hard to find.

Comments

[Christopher Hostage]

In general, formatting a disk would get you what you wanted. The built-in Mac Disk Utility GUI is sometimes useful for it, but the usefulness of the Disk Utility has lessened in the last five years. (i.e. not showing all plugged in devices)

[jjrr]

be aware that you might get and error (like in my case), such as "Error with zero disk erase: Couldn't open disk (-69879)"

[user702846]

@jjrr what did you do then ?

[jjrr]

(sorry, I don't remember anymore exactly :/ -- maybe this stackoverflow.com/a/53052852/5533078 )