Linux Mint Not Recognizing New External Hard Drive Properly

I recently bought an external hard drive by maxone to use with a Mac that I have. The instructions that I got with it was to connect it to a Windows PC and format it before I can use it with a Mac, but since I only have a Linux machine available I was hoping to be able to format it from Linux. I have encountered similar problems some years ago but ended up finding a Windows PC to solve it. I was surprised to not find forum posts that helped me resolve it but I searched and the few things that were similar that I found were not solved, others had minor differences than my case, maybe I just didn't understand some of them properly. ## My System Linux Mint 20.04 Toshiba Satelite laptop with the hard drive connected to the USB 3.0 connection. uname -a results: Linux 5.4.0-77-generic #86-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jun 17 02:35:03 UTC 2021 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux ## The Problem + What I tried When I connect the hard drive I can see it turns on and feel it spinning. In the Linux Mint settings under "Disks" I can see a new hard drive pop up as "Maxone USB 3.0". The "Volume" section says "No Media" and appears as /dev/sdc. The the gears button has everything greyed out (including the formatting option" except for "Edit mount options" which use defaults. I can see in the terminal that /dev/sdc exists. It does not appear under in /proc/partitions though. fdisk -l does not recognize the disk at all. I tried using Gparted but it did not recognize the hard drive either. lsusb did find: Bus 004 Device 005: ID 152d:0583 JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron USA Technology Corp. Maxone sudo lshw -c disk finds: *-disk description: SCSI Disk product: USB 3.0 vendor: Maxone physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@7:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sdc version: 0209 serial: DD564198838A2 configuration: ansiversion=6 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512 When I connect the hard drive I see in dmesg the following: [205381.443074] usb 4-1: new SuperSpeed Gen 1 USB device number 6 using xhci_hcd [205381.464174] usb 4-1: New USB device found, idVendor=152d, idProduct=0583, bcdDevice= 2.09 [205381.464179] usb 4-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 [205381.464183] usb 4-1: Product: Maxone [205381.464186] usb 4-1: Manufacturer: Maxone [205381.464188] usb 4-1: SerialNumber: 000020200909 [205381.470699] scsi host7: uas [205381.472216] scsi 7:0:0:0: Direct-Access Maxone USB 3.0 0209 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6 [205381.473026] sd 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0 Given all of this I could not figure out a way to format the hard drive, as I do not have a partition to format or a way to initialize the drive (that I can tell at least). ### Edit As per the comments I ran some more commands that unfortunately did not work and here are the results: sudo mkfs -t fat /dev/sdc: mkfs.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24) attribute "partition" not found mkfs.fat: unable to discover size of /dev/sdc sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdc: mke2fs 1.45.5 (07-Jan-2020) mkfs.ext4: Device size reported to be zero. Invalid partition specified, or partition table wasn't reread after running fdisk, due to a modified partition being busy and in use. You may need to reboot to re-read your partition table. sudo echo , | sudo sfdisk /dev/sdc: sfdisk: cannot open /dev/sdc: No such file or directory (this is despite /dev/sdc existing (I can see it using ls) ## Final Questions Is the only way to initialize and format a newly bought external hard drive that was intended for Windows in Windows itself? Is there no way to do this on Linux? What causes the drive to be recognized as /dev/sdc but at the same time not be registered by fdisk? Is this because of the filesystem type on it? Shouldn't fdisk be able to nuke and re-initialize a hard drive no matter what? Thank you for your time and any help you may be able to provide.