Zero filling solves disk problem

Today I tried to use a second-hand CF card as internal hard disk (via CF to IDE conversion) on a legacy notebook (the sixteen-years-old X40). Initially the card was not recognized by the BIOS. I did some experiments and found that both the converter board and the CF card were working properly on another system. However, I noticed that there were certain directories generated by digital cameras on the card, suggesting that the card was once used on cameras.

Then I performed zero filling to completely reset the partition table, maybe 8 or 16 MiB (sudo dd bs=1M count=8). Then the card was recognized by the BIOS. I installed 32-bit Debian on it. I also used the zero filling method to fix corrupted or duplicated partition table. With only 8 or 16 MiB written to the disk, the wearing was kept at minimum.