Erasing external drive for storage - Mint 13

[scot^2]

The enclosure worked. I plugged in the usb and seconds later the drive was automatically mounted, the icon appeared on the desktop, and the file manager of the drive was opened showing the files.

...

I decided to put the drive back in the 2nd hdd again. I did, then opened Disks. Surprisingly, it said it was of an unknown format. That is, it seemed to revert back to the original problem. I reformatted to ext4 though successfully, and then was able to mount the drive.