Formatting External HDD (Seagate Expansion Portable)

[swissmacbookprouser]

Hi all,

I purchased an external HDD for Time Machine backups, but I run into issues with regards to partitioning. Now, after playing around a bit with partitions, everything seems messed up. The 4TB HDD shows up as two partitions with 4TB each, i.e. 8TB in total on a 4TB HDD.

I tried re-erasing, re-partioning but somehow I cannot get rid of these two partitions.

Is there a way to "Start from scratch" with the external HDD, i.e. delete ALL partitions, volumes, etc?

Thanks so much for your help and apologies if these are stupid questions. This is my first Mac...

Thanks a lot

 

[swissmacbookprouser]

PS: Disk utility shows me that also one of the partitions is essentially full and I cannot do anything, even reformatting it to another format does not change anything (despite going through without any issues)

Diskutil shows the following, somehow there is a "synthesised" drive shown there:

 

[swissmacbookprouser]

Not sure how I can close this discussion again, I was able to solve it by using "sudo gpt destroy disk4" and rebuilding everything from scratch.