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?
df -h
only shows filesystems. Until you create a partition and format it, you don't have a filesystem. Trylsblk
which shows disks and partitions.wipefs
(just in case, probably not needed),fdisk
(orgdisk
),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.