Erasing an MBR (or GPT) and / or partition table and data of a disk

This can performed with dd - in order to wipe the MBR (the first sector this is executed after the BIOS / hardware initialisation) we should issue:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=446 count=1

This wipes the first 446 bytes of the disk - while if we want to erase the MBR and the partition table we need to zero the first 512 bytes:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=512 count=1

And then to erase the data on the disk we can issue:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=4M count=1

Note: While strictly speaking the vast majority of modern drives actually have block sizes of 4096 bytes however the MBR and partition table are always restricted to the first 512.

GPT is slightly different - instead we need to ensure that the first 1024 bytes are zeroed:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=1024 count=1

and also be aware that a backup of the GPT table is also stored at the end of the disk - so we need to work out the last block as well.