Quote Originally Posted by sudodus View Post
Did you also create a new partition table?

In that case you might succeed better if you wipe the first megabyte of the drive. This should remove anything that might distract gparted.
Code:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=1024 count=1024
where /dev/sdx is the drive you want to wipe, it used to be /dev/sdf but, check again because if you make a mistake, another drive will be wiped (and it cannot be repaired).

Then try as before with gparted.

If still no go, maybe there is some problem with the electronics of the external USB casing or the USB system in your computer, and you need to resort to sidzen's advice to mount the drive internally.
Hi sudodus, I gave this a go but unfortunately had the same result.