I read an old thread in the Forum on this topic, but my situation seems to be sufficiently different to start again.
I have bought a Western Digital “WD Blue” solid state drive 500 GB with SATA connections. As it came, it was already partitioned for Windows, with a NTFS C: partition. Trying to install Windows directly onto it failed, but that is not my intended use. I want it as a Linux backup drive. Windows used the drive’s C: partition for its swap file. Before I can format it for Linux, I need to get rid of that swap partition.
I tried to format it from Linux, but no Linux distro, including Knoppix 9 and Gparted, sees it AT ALL. The SATA table knows that something is there, but cannot load it.
Have I missed something?