Hello PCNetSpec,
I screwed up last night. I ended up terminating a secure format on my internal hard drive when I was trying to format my external hard drive. Now, I have my old external 320 GB hard drive with 500000 bad sectors as my internal hard drive, and my good 500 GB Toshiba internal hard drive as my external hard drive --because it doesn't work.
If I install it internally I get this password request for HDD/SDD. I'd like to find a way to power format through this, so I can have my Toshiba drive back again and installed internally. I've switched the drives around a few times, and tried using my Windows Recover Drive, and old Windows 8 installation media to save the day --but no luck. Called Toshiba, was told I'd find help and a video in the Toshiba forum --that I needed to go inside my computer to hit a reset button. I've found no solution to such a silly problem.
And suggestions would be appreciated. Right NOW I'm running 64-bit 16.04 Unity internally. Using Disks and Gparted has done nothing to repair my 500 GB Toshiba hard drive that I now have as a USELESS external drive.
What a jam I've found myself in here.

Thank you,
perknh
P.S.
I get the message from Disks:
Error Formatting Volume (for DOS)
Spoiler (click here to view / hide)
Error creating file system: Command-line `parted --script "/dev/sda" mktable msdos' exited with non-zero exit status 1: Warning: Error fsyncing/closing /dev/sda: Input/output error
Error: Input/output error during read on /dev/sda
Error: Input/output error during write on /dev/sda
Warning: Error fsyncing/closing /dev/sda: Input/output error
(udisks-error-quark, 0)
&
Error Formatting Disks (for Ext4)
Spoiler (click here to view / hide)
Error creating file system: Command-line `mkfs.ext4 -F -L "" "/dev/sda"' exited with non-zero exit status 37:
stdout: `/dev/sda is entire device, not just one partition!
Creating filesystem with 122096646 4k blocks and 30531584 inodes
Filesystem UUID: b4414ce3-c124-4518-b9a8-bfc54c03dd74
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968,
102400000
Allocating group tables: 0/3727 485/3727 done
Writing inode tables: 0/3727 done
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: 0/3727'
stderr: `mke2fs 1.42.13 (17-May-2015)
Warning: could not erase sector 2: Attempt to write block to filesystem resulted in short write
Warning: could not read block 0: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read
Warning: could not erase sector 0: Attempt to write block to filesystem resulted in short write
Warning, had trouble writing out superblocks.' (udisks-error-quark, 0)