I recently bought a 2TB WD Black hard drive and installed it in an enclosure to use as media storage for my Micca Spect media player. The installation went well and I booted into Ubuntu (14.04 LTS with full drive and home folder encryption) to format the drive. I don't recall creating any partitions, I just clicked on the main drive selection and formatted it in NTFS. It looked like everything went well, until the next time I plugged it in. Now, the GUI of the hard drive in the 'Disks' program shows several partitions that I know I didn't intentionally create and I get different errors when I try to delete them or reformat them. The drive also appears twice in the sidebar. I'll include images and as much detail as possible.
First, here is a screenshot of the free space and partitions:
Here is what it looks like when I click on the other entry for the same hard drive:
Note that for this entry, the "format" option and other options are grayed out and I can't do anything. Also this entry remains in the sidebar when I disconnect the hard drive.
When I click on Partition 1 the device path is /dev/sdb1
and for partition 2 it is /dev/sdb2
while BOTH free space entries are /dev/sdb
.
When I click on 'Partition 1', click the minus sign, and choose 'remove' I get the following error:
Error deleting partition /dev/sdb1: Command-line `parted --script "/dev/sdb" "rm 1"' exited with non-zero exit status 1:
Error: /dev/sdb: unrecognised disk label (udisks-error-quark, 0)
When I do the same for partition 2, I get this error:
Error deleting partition /dev/sdb2: Command-line `parted --script "/dev/sdb" "rm 2"' exited with non-zero exit status 1:
Error: /dev/sdb: unrecognised disk label (udisks-error-quark, 0)
When I try to reformat either partition I get this error:
Error synchronizing after initial wipe: Timed out waiting for object (udisks-error-quark, 0)
I was getting another error before that I am now having trouble reproducing, but it said something along the lines of "it's possible the drive was formatted without being partitioned" or something like that, which sounds like what I did.
I tried erasing and reformatting several different ways and always get an error. There is no data on the drive, and it's brand new. All I want to do is wipe it clean and restore it to the way it was when I got it so I can try partitioning and formatting it again. I want a single 2TB partition formatted in NTFS to store movies on for playing off my Micca Spect media player. I would really appreciate some help here, I'm hoping I didn't just destroy a brand new and expensive hard drive.
A note about my computer skills: I prefer GUI solutions, however I am able to use the command line provided you walk me through it. Again, there's no data or anything, all I want is a blank 2TB NTFS formatted hard drive. As a last resort, I would be willing to pay someone to fix it, or would this be covered under warranty? Do you think I can call NewEgg and get a replacement? After all, I did follow the instructions that came with the enclosure (although, the problem seems to be with the drive.)
Thank you in advance for any help. This drive cost about $150 and I need it working within the next week, so I would be very happy if someone is able to help me fix it.
UPDATE 12/21/2014:
Thank you for the answers, what ended up working was running gparted, creating a new partition with the default ms-dos filesystem, and then formatting that partition with NTFS, all done with gparted. I guess the default "Disks" utility could not read the hard drive properly, it looks like I formatted with NTFS without first creating a partition. Anyway, all it working well now. I haven't checked if it works with the Micca Spect yet, but the drive itself is working.