As someone who tests a lot of different devices (desktops, laptops, single-board computers) and operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux), I create a lot of bootable USB drives.

Although I believe Rufus for Windows is a superior tool for creating bootable images, I commonly use balenaEtcher as it supports Windows, macOS and Linux.

The tool itself works great and can be used for a wide range of purposes. For example, creating bootable Linux USB drives and/or flashing operating systems to be used with single-board computers (e.g., Raspberry Pi , etc.)

However, the resulting bootable USB is often unreadable when looking to reformat for other purposes.

Thankfully, when this scenario occurs, it is easily resolved using the following commands.

Windows

  1. Open a CMD prompt and run the command diskpart.exe.
  2. Run the command list disk.
  3. Run the command select disk x, where “x” is the disk ID shown in the previously generated list.
  4. Run the command clean, which will erase the file system.

macOS

  1. Open Terminal and run the command diskutil list.
  2. Run the command diskutil eraseDisk FAT32 UNTITLED MBRFormat /dev/diskX, where “diskX” is the target USB drive.

Linux

  1. Open Terminal and run the command sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/xyz bs=512 count=1 conv=notrunc, where “abc” is the target USB drive device path.

Upon completion of these steps, the USB drive should respond as normal, accessible to any operating system for reformatting.

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