Cannot partition nor erase new SSD hard drive

hi.  After my hard drive failed I replaced it with a new SSD.  after going into Internet recovery, however, the options to partition or erase the new drive in disc utility are grayed out.  Any ideas? Thank you.

Do I understand correctly that you're replacing the new machine's original hard drive with this SSD? If so, here's a different approach to installing the OS on it:
Put the SSD into an external enclosure and the original drive back into the MBP. Connect the external to the MBP, boot the MBP from the internal HD, format the SSD with Disk Utility, and clone the original hard drive onto the SSD after reformatting the SSD with Disk Utility. You can do the cloning with Disk Utility, but I prefer Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper because they're more informative about what's happening during the process. After the clone is complete, install the SSD into the MBP and test.

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    This is good to know. Although I didn't have anything in the trash, I have no idea how much is in the various caches and logs. I'd be surprised if they totaled 4GB, though. I'm still worried about this backup, as explained below after doing a Console log check.
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    I didn't have anything else running except TM, so no files were open. I checked the exclusions in the yellow box #11, the Terminal Command, and /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions.pl ist, but nothing seemed to point to the video files I have saved. So I'm still at a loss with this part of the backup.
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    I looked at the log - thank you for the link on how to see it - but the entries show that the size of the backup was even less than I thought - It seems I am actually missing 0.2 GB from the HD2 partition, 6 GB from the iMac HD, and 14.4 GB from the Video partition. And since it shows the exclusion amounts, I'm really at a loss for the iMac HD now. Here's what the Console listed for this backup:
    Aug 29 00:55:54 paul-imac-5 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[567]: Backup content size: 174.7 GB excluded items size: 0 bytes for volume HD2
    Aug 29 00:55:54 paul-imac-5 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[567]: Backup content size: 355.7 GB excluded items size: 0 bytes for volume Video
    Aug 29 00:55:54 paul-imac-5 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[567]: Backup content size: 116.3 GB excluded items size: 30.5 MB for volume Macintosh HD
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    Aug 29 19:18:46 paul-imac-5 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[567]: Copied 146976 files (626.2 GB) from volume Macintosh HD.
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    Thank you for this advice. This should save lots of time. I won't erase my other partitions when I do this, right? Also, will it leave a blank partition there so I regain my space?
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