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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.

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2 Answers 2

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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.

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    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)
    – MountainMan
    Commented Sep 14, 2018 at 20:08
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    be aware that you might get and error (like in my case), such as "Error with zero disk erase: Couldn't open disk (-69879)"
    – jjrr
    Commented Jul 2, 2019 at 8:56
  • @jjrr what did you do then ?
    – user702846
    Commented Nov 4, 2020 at 20:45
  • (sorry, I don't remember anymore exactly :/ -- maybe this stackoverflow.com/a/53052852/5533078 )
    – jjrr
    Commented Nov 10, 2020 at 14:21
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Disk utility gives error because it detects the wrong identifier - what I did

was using diskutil list and then based on the memory size, could find the right Identifier - here disk2 - then I used diskutil zeroDisk /dev/disk2

enter image description here

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