I just realized I never did follow up on this post and thought I should do so for the sake of anyone else googling about a simliar problem.

So I found the problem and was able to fix it a couple weeks back. I unplugged the disk from the ubuntu box and plugged into my windows machine. Windows could also not identify it property either. Using Windows Computer Management (Disk Management) console, I noticed right away that the disk wasn't formatted properly. I want the disk to have NTFS formatting so the fact Windows didn't recognize it spoke volumes. I don't recall ~exactly~ what the problem was (I want to say it had something to do with an 'Unallocated table"....?) but I corrected it easily within Disk Management and Windows was able to recognize the drive again. I then plug the disk back into the ubuntu box and mounted it without an issue.

I then used Clonezilla to clone my tiny-sized system disk to the now-working disk (this time using the -K switch so that it would size the last partition to use all the disk space) and all is well now.

My only outstanding issue is that all these dummy disks are still listed when using sudo lshw -C disk
Code:
*-disk:0
       description: SCSI Disk
       physical id: 0.0.0
       bus info: scsi@6:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/sde
  *-disk:1
       description: SCSI Disk
       physical id: 0.0.1
       bus info: scsi@6:0.0.1
       logical name: /dev/sdf
  *-disk:2
       description: SCSI Disk
       physical id: 0.0.2
       bus info: scsi@6:0.0.2
       logical name: /dev/sdg
  *-disk:3
       description: SCSI Disk
       physical id: 0.0.3
       bus info: scsi@6:0.0.3
       logical name: /dev/sdh
How do I go about removing them from the system?