PI-4B / 4g no system tool key/button

[rcline]

I'm new here and I know basically nothing about computers. I'm 67, retired and I bought a few small lasers to help make a couple of bucks.
I bought a PI-4B / 4G To do one simple thing, that is get on the net to go to LightBurn and Imag-R and run my laser. ( I bought four PIs for four lasers)
Problem, while I was waiting on down loading that stuff onto my micro sd card, I thought I would plug only the power and the ssd card
in the PI to locate any/all lights. All was fine until I forgot to unplug the ssd before plugging in the sd card and booting up. The RB OS works great,
wireless, blue tooth, speakers, date/clock everything works great. I even made Start Page my home page or search engine, what ever IT people call
it. I later noticed my mistake with the ssd, now it has stuff on it and when I try to remove it, I can't! So I cannot set up a partition or anything else.
how do I wipe the ssd clean so I can start over? My second problem is that the system tools key/button in the PI OS menu has vanished, gone, no findy!
I found a window that I opened and looked, it showed sys tool key turned on but it"s not showing up in the menu. Can you help me?
Thank you for your time and concern in this matter.
Randy
11/28/22 - 2:00pm

 

[Easy Rhino]

All was fine until I forgot to unplug the ssd before plugging in the sd card and booting up.

how do I wipe the ssd clean so I can start over?

I'm a bit confused. If you want to wipe the SSD you can plug it into a working computer and use the hard drive tools or whatever software your OS uses and format it and partition it.

 

[rcline]

I'm a bit confused. If you want to wipe the SSD you can plug it into a working computer and use the hard drive tools or whatever software your OS uses and format it and partition it.

Let me start over. Brand new PI-4B and brand new WD 240g ssd. (both out of box) I was in the pi hut site following their install / set up instruction. I had the micro sd plug into my 17 year old
beast running windows 7 pro. While down loading / installing the info onto the sd card, I thought that I would plug in power and the ssd card into the PI just to see where all the lights are located.
I then turned off power to the PI. And I forgot to unplug the ssd. Now I stick the micro sd into the PI, power up and follow instructions. Everything goes great, no problems. Then I noticed that I had forgotten to unplug the ssd before booting up with the sd card. Now because the ssd card was plug in during first PI boot up, it put stuff on the ssd card. Now I cannot do anything with the ssd card. I cannot even partition the card. When trying to set up a partition, I had to go to OS menu, then click system tools and click Gparted. I did that and then a window popped up showing
line 1 - unallocated partition size - 223.?? gb and this is the only thing that was supposed to show up. But a line 2 and line 3 appeared. (not supposed to be there) I highlighted line 3, right click and remove. That worked, now line 2. No that did not work, a window popped up and said that I had to remove line 2 manually. I don't know how to do that. And the thing will not let me
complete doing a partition. So I shut everything down, shut off power and unplugged the ssd. Then power and boot no with no problems. Only now my system tool button is missing from the
drop down menu list. ( I think this covers it all better)
Randy