Why can't I format my blank SSD from OSX Recovery? The SSD in my Macbook Pro died suddenly. I bought a blank one, installed it as the internal drive, and booted into recovery mode by holding Command + R.

After letting it connect to WiFi and download its tools, I tried installing OSX on the new hard drive. However, when it said "select the disk where you want to install OS X", the drive was not listed.

So I went into Disk Utility and tried to format the disk. Anytime I tried to partition or format it (and I tried many different options), it gave me an error like "File system formatter failed". It would successfully create partitions, but that's it. I could not make the drive mountable.

How can I get it to format this drive so I can install the operating system on it?
Use Disk Utility from a working machine

I don't know why this didn't work in recovery mode, but a friend suggested I plug the SSD into a working Mac with a USB adapter and try using the working Mac's Disk Utility to format the drive.

I did, and that worked. Now I'm installing OS X on it using recovery mode.

Maybe (I'm speculating) the version of Disk Utility that I have recovery mode (my computer came with Mountain Lion) doesn't know how to work with SSDs?

In any case, Disk Utility on a machine running El Capitan was able to format the drive via my USB adapter.