That's great, Steve! And I take it that everything went "as expected" this time? You sometimes run into little issues that just baffle the heck out of you.... probably most can be solved, but how long might it take? Some are easier than others, but it can be "fun" or "challenging" as you have already found.
And, I don't mean to rush you or anything.... but, are you ready to break it again yet?
Okay, no hurry. But just want you to keep thinking of where you might want to go... like maybe learning that "something else" installation technique. But that can also be learned somewhat when you install the next distro you choose, but you do want to be prepared for mistakes and the possibility that you might have to come back to this point and start from scratch again. I like fresh installations, but Wizard has a great tutorial on the Timeshift program and I think was mentioned before.... it can allow you to restore your essential system from a backup/snapshot. You may want to learn more about that as you go as it can be very useful.
Of course, you need a place to put those backups, and your GoFlex will be a logical choice. I know you've accepted the data loss, but I mentioned that Gparted has at least a chance of repairing the errors that were reported. I don't think it will take to long to check/fix the drive, but I may be wrong too, and it might take many hours.... too hard to predict that for sure. The steps to try are quite simple though. Whether it fixes it or not, cleaning up this drive is probably the next task, right?
1. Have your shiny new Linux Mint MATE up and running, but don't start Gparted yet. And dont have the GoFlex plugged in yet.
2. Now plug in the USB cable to the GoFlex. Turn it on if it has a power button. Give it time to initialize. It may or may not show an icon on the desktop.
3. Now run Gparted, and I think you'll need the dropdown box to select the GoFlex.... which at this point should be /dev/sdb. Yes?
4. On the GoFlex drive, you'll see the two partitions, NTFS and ext4.
5.Right-click on the NTFS drive and look around the middle of popup that shows the available options... if
Unmount is not dimmed out, then click on it so that the NTFS partition is unmounted. If it is already unmounted, it will show the word
Mount instead, and it may be clickable or dimmed out, but don't click on it to mount it. Unmounted is what you want.
6. Right-click on the NTFS partition again... this time look a little lower below the Mount/Unmount.... below "Manage Flags".... you want the
Check option. This will attempt to check and repair the partition. I've never used this, so I don't really know what to expect... for length of time or for what results or options it may give you when finished. You'll have to pay close attention to this step. And I guess you've learned about Gparted already that it doesn't jump into action... it leaves the "operation pending" until you click the "Apply" arrow in the menu area. Once it begins, try to do anything else it may ask or require... maybe rebooting at the end, I don't know. When all is complete, if you are looking at it again with Gparted and see any of that dim yellow color taking up some of the partition, you may can access the files on it. You may need to eject and restart the drive to re-mount it.
WARNING!
Now that we're at this stage.... I want to give you what may be the most important Linux advice you will get:
NEVER unplug removable media (pen drives, external hard drives, camera memory cards, anything like that) without first telling Linux to "safely remove drive" or "eject" or "unmount".... the wording varies. Windows also offered a method to "safely remove drive"... but with Windows it wasn't as critical as it is with Linux... and many Windows users would simply yank the media (or USB cable) out without safely removing first. If you are in this habit, break it now! When Windows would, say, copy a file to a pen drive, it would really do it, and it would complete it... which is why you could get away with yanking the drive out when done (but not while still writing data). Linux is very different in this. If you tell Linux to copy a file to a pen drive, Linux says, "Okay, I'll store that instruction in RAM and get around to it when I feel like it." When you then tell it to unmount/eject/safely remove, then Linux will say, "Oh, okay.... just a sec while I catch up my chores and put your data on the pen drive." It will then usually report to you that it is safe to remove, or the drive (icon) will disappear from the desktop or from the file manager.So if you yank the pen drive out without safely removing, you will frequently have trouble and will likely lose data. Booting on the pen drive was different, so no worries there. But now you may be using pen drives and your GoFlex frequently with Linux... so you need to heed this advice.
OK, with that out of the way. Let me go back to the GoFlex for a bit. If the
Check works and you can access files, you can copy them to your new Linux Mint for temporary storage.... probably the safest thing to do and you should have plenty of space. So if you complete the file copy, or if the repair failed and you're ready to just blow it all away.... you can use Gparted again to hopefully make it all good again. Again get the GoFlex up in Gparted, and right-click on each of the partitions and choose
Delete. When all finished, you will have only one large unallocated space. Click your "Apply" button up on top and it will quickly complete the deletion. Then right-click on the unallocated space and your only choice should be
New. I think you've got it from here because of your experimenting earlier tonight. I would still recommend NTFS so that you can later use it to save any data (or recovered data if we are able) from your Samsung drive. Linux can use NTFS just fine, and it is usually about the best choice. Even if you give up Windows totally, you would be able to take the GoFlex to any other computer and use it (but Mac computers may not play well).
After formatting the GoFlex with NTFS, we hope that no errors are reported, and that it will work properly and give good service. Remember to "safely remove" before you unplug the USB cable or before you turn it off if it has a power button. Oh, if the GoFlex still shows the "boot flag".... you can again right-click on the partition, and choose
Manage Flags to remove it. I think it should be gone, but just in case. If there are other flags after creating the new partition, leave them alone.
I don't think I've jumped too far ahead, and I hope I haven't skipped or forgotten stuff. Enjoy the game!
Cheers