partitioning - Zombie partitions

This issue has evolved. ^{IT'S ALIVEEEEEEEEEE!!!}

After giving the disk a brand-new partition table (or that's what gparted would have me think it's done), this is what gparted shows:

How great! Magical partitions and magical data that I killed a week ago have come back from the dead!

Fine, maybe gnome-disks can help the problem.

Evidently, udisks and gparted are conspiring to make me smash my head on a brick!

Well, no matter, perhaps it will comply if I format it using gnome-disks... never mind.

Then I tried formatting it with gparted again and it seemed to comply! However, as soon as Ubiquity tried to format it / run partman on it for an Ubuntu installation, Ubiquity crashed as it has before, at this screen:

What do I do? Is there a magical tool which will soothe my Ubuntu installation woes, or need I buy a new disk? I really don't want to buy a new disk. _{I'm poor, okay??}

I'm not tempted to believe I need a new disk, i.e. that this one is physically damaged because it's a few-months old SSD. It never leaves the compartment on my laptop, so I don't see how encrypting it equates to physical damage, but whatever.

I am just going to throw this out there, but maybe you can try clearing the memory cells if you don't want any of the data on that drive.

Here is a great step-by-step for memory cell clearing on a SSD drive.