[Discuss] Unable to partition a new drive = death?

[sweetser at alum.mit.edu (Doug)]

Hello:

I have been trying to format a Western Digital 2TB drive purchased
from TigerDirect in March of this year. I have yet to use it to do
anything, jobs, family and research being what they are. I have a SATA
enclosure, but the MacOS disk utility on 2 machines refused to do
anything with it. I decided to hook it up directly to a linux box. One
red cable is the power, another looks like data, both have those
connectors shaped like an L.

The linux machine complained bitterly about this hard drive at boot
time, over 382 lines of complaints, many like this:

[ 3491.211049] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb]  Result: hostbyte=DID_OK
driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[ 3491.211052] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb]  Sense Key : Aborted Command
[current] [descriptor]
[ 3491.211067] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb]  Add. Sense: No additional sense information
[ 3491.211070] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00
[ 3491.211076] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 0
[ 3491.211078] Buffer I/O error on device sdb, logical block 0
[ 3491.450290] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb]  Result: hostbyte=DID_OK
driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[ 3491.450293] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb]  Sense Key : Aborted Command
[current] [descriptor]
[ 3491.450308] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb]  Add. Sense: No additional sense information
[ 3491.450311] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00
[ 3491.450317] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 0

This is what gparted reports:

Model: ATA WDC WD20EADS-00S
Size: 1.82 tiB
Path: /dev/sdb

Parition table: unrecognized
Heads: 255
Sectors/track: 63
Cylinders: 243201
Total sectors: 3907029168
Sector size: 512

The first step is to go under the Device and pick out
Create Partition Table

It reports this:
/dev/sdb: unrecognised disk label
Input/output error during read on /dev/sdb
Input/output error during read on /dev/sdb
Input/output error during write on /dev/sdb
Error fsyncing/closing /dev/sdb: Input/output error

Not so good.

Am I missing something, or is this drive Dead On Arrival + 8 months?
Doug

Not related, but I will be doing my MIT IAP course again:
http://student.mit.edu/searchiap/iap-a443.html
Same topics, but this time I have to report on the errors in my work.