In Mint I cannot mount my recently formatted SSD, WD Elements. Does it need a partition? I wiped it with a Windows program. I can put on a partition as well if that makes it work.

I would appreciate any help.

would be nice to explain exactly what did you try: how did you wipe it, how did you format it and how did you try to mount it.
Since we have no idea what's happened hard to say partitioning will work. (actually it can work without that too).

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+ask...nonical&ia=web

I think I used freeware, parted magic, I formerly had a sticky Fedora distro on it and had difficulty formatting it. Overwrite with zeros.

Plugged in this external memory does not appear on the desktop alike the other card. When searched for in, my computer, WD Elements is there, when clicked on it reads that it cannot be mounted. It will not open.

it looks like you did not format it properly. That's why no filesystem was found.

What pan65 said.
Post the output from parted -l command.

There's your problem. Partition the drive and then format the partition; that should solve the problem.

This must be specific to WD Elements then, normally partitioning is not needed for single filesystem. Care to elaborate?

Partitioning is always needed AFAIK. Typically, an external hard drive will have one partition formatted to either vfat or ntfs when purchased. If he deleted that partition and formatted the raw device(e.g. sda instead of sda1) he would be having exactly the problem he is describing. I've never heard of it being done any other way. In fact, I didn't know it was possible to format the drive directly as a raw block device without partitioning first until I discovered it by accident. See these threads for a discussion of this topic:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...-table-880149/

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...9/#post5588842

I have been using hard drives as raw devices for 19 years, never had any issues.

Without partitions you mount like:

With partitions you mount like:

Use the first way if you have a typical USB stick with a vfat filesystem and no partitions.

Emerson, are you using LVM? You can add a raw unpartitioned drive to an LVM group but you wouldn't normally do that with an external hard drive.

No LVM, below is my /home filesystem as an example.

Partitioning has never been necessary in Linux. You will get a warning from mkfs.ext{2,3,4} if you ask it to create a filesystem on an unpartitioned drive, but it will happily do so if you confirm that this is your intention.

The definition of partitioning: Dividing into parts. Now, if you need only one piece, why cut?

Better to ask Novation and the two others in threads I previously posted. They all apparently had problems with formatted raw block devices.