My WD Ultra My Passport has a 50gb Ubuntu partition that I can’t delete
 

I’m trying to install manjaro on an external hd to boot off of. It’s a 1TB but only approx 930GiB is available, when I look (only on my Linux machine) I see 2 partitions under an Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS volume name, but when I reformatted the drive to clear this (if I don’t it gives me grief when burning manjaro

Try to use fdisk on console.

As above, fdisk or cfdisk, from the console, (make sure it isn't mounted automatically), remove all partitions, create a new one for the whole disk, & write it to disk. Reboot with your Manjaro disk, & make the installation. :)

are you trying to burn the manjaro .iso straight onto the hard drive? that will work, but you won't be able to then install manjaro onto that same drive.
also, it is likely that it will occupy the whole hd, which would be an incredible waste of space.

I'd use parted.

So when I fdisk it just shows /dev/sdb 931 GiB, when I wipe and reformat with gparted I can but it just wiped the 931 GiB cause that’s all it sees, and I know it’s missing 70ish GiB cause it’s a 1tb drive, if I hit properties on the disk then it shows me the ubuntu and that’s the name of the disk even when I reformat it to ext4 it keeps the Ubuntu part, but when I try to burn using the dd if= command or whatever it is it says permission is denied

The drive is not missing any space. See below.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte

okay thanks for the help gang! I appreciate it!

PASSPORT does not have a mbr boatable anything, if you're wanting to boot off an external hdd, get an laptop internal and hook up, then you'll fine it much easier to do.

2. you're not going to get close to 1TB on a 1TB even a 500GB will not show 500GB.

this is my 3TB and it only shows
so its missing like .3 GB to show 3TB but it;s not really missing it, it is the means that one uses to sell the HDD and the different method a system uses to show what the amount the HDD has. this is why "they" came up with MiB etc..