How to safely "reset" the hard drive

In the course of trying different operating systems on my old Macbook Air (including Ubuntu currently), I've somehow managed to accrue a total of 13 partitions on my SSD. How can I clean up this mess, basically bring the SSD back to a virgin state? To be clear - I want to completely wipe the thing, get rid of everything that's on it, including all those partitions. No problem losing any data that are on it. I do want to keep using this machine though, and install an OS when I'm done with this clean-up. So I don't want to wreck the thing.

Solution 1:

You have tagged "disk-formatting" and this is exactly what you need to do.

Ubuntu comes with "Disks" which is an easy-to-use GUI application to format and manage drives and partitions.

Simply open the "Disks" application, choose the disk you want to format on the left, and then choose "Format" in the drop down "hamburger" menu.

You will get an option to format the disk as GPT or MBR. GPT is generally the better choice as it will allow you to install modern UEFI operating systems. GPT does not have an overly restrictive partition limit. MBR has a limit of 4 partitions.

After the disk is formatted, you can use the + symbol to create partitions and file systems.

Make sure you pick the right drive, because this will effectively delete everything on it, just as you've asked.