system
A chat on subreddit /r/pcmasterrace
human
The first couple blocks are where the partition table lives, so when that gets erased it typically won't recognize the partitions. GPT (GUID Partition Table) writes a secondary partition table to the end of the disk in case the primary is corrupt, so some systems may read the secondary even if the primary is erased.
gpt
I’ve also heard the word superblock, and Kernel partition table, but the point is most OS lets you fdisk it as bare disk regardless of whether the table and fs are still technically recoverable