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I need some help rescuing a new and blank 4 terabyte external SSD USB hard drive.

The original partitions were 3.64T and a 0.36 partition labeled "Microsoft Partition"

Using GParted, I accidentally lost both of those partitions.

I tried using GParted to make a fresh partition table. GParted ran over night and never finished. The next morning "process in progress" was still listed there. I saw several error messages flash by saying my "computer was full". Huh? I was working on a blank 4T external drive.

As of now, when I plug the 4T drive in Mint Linux does not mount it.

It also does not appear when running df -h ( before I messed things up it appeared as /dev/sdb2).

I would for the drive to be recognized by Linux again, have one large partition ( I want to copy multiple hard drive images to it ), and be formatted in ext4.

Is there a way to do this and have some kind of progress indicator running since it is such a large drive? I would like to know that things are working and I would like to be able to retrieve error messages.

Given that, how would I do this via the command line?

user787832
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  • It's normal for it to not be mounted if it's not partitioned. Writing a partition table should be super quick though since it just writes the table... – user253751 Feb 16 '21 at 15:26
  • df -h does not detect it. How can I partition it via a command line tool if I don't have a path to point it to? – user787832 Feb 16 '21 at 16:43
  • df -h only shows filesystems. Until you create a partition and format it, you don't have a filesystem. Try lsblk which shows disks and partitions. – user253751 Feb 16 '21 at 16:45
  • In short: wipefs (just in case, probably not needed), fdisk (or gdisk), mkfs.ext4 (why so many tools?). Can you take it from here? (man is your friend). I understand you want to create everything anew, i.e. discard the old data whatever it is. What a great opportunity to experiment! There are only two scenarios where things get worse: (1) you confuse disks (e.g. /dev/sda instead of /dev/sdb; lsblk is also your friend; think twice twice); (2) random malfunction of the hardware. – Kamil Maciorowski Feb 16 '21 at 17:15

1 Answers1

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Thanks to Kamil Maciorowski's comment I got enough clues to find this tutorial that exactly fit what I was trying to do

https://linuxize.com/post/fdisk-command-in-linux/

user787832
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