Okay, I've erased EVERYTHING off the first drive, so now it's totally blank with no partitions at all. Also worth noting, I've moved the drive in question from SATA0 to SATA1 while the second drive is still disconnected.

Now, Disk Utility detects the first drive, and I can attempt to format to HFS+.
However, even after multiple tries, I still end up with Disk Erase Failed; Operation Timed Out error.

What is going on here?? I'm quite literally at my wits end.
Nicholas.