Why does a Linux (Debian 12) ext4 file system creation fail at installation from a live USB?

  • Laptop: Dell Latitude E6410
  • HDD: WD1200BEVS – 22LAT0, not the original, taken from another laptop which reached its end of life but the HDD worked there until the end.

I tried it twice. The HDD is detected successfully. I selected one partition for everything and confirmed the proposed ext4 119 GB, swap 1 GB. After a while the following message appears (translated from German, so may not be the real English one):

Creating the file system ext4 of partition 1 on SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) failed.