How to reformat disk "like new" ("unformat" a disk)?

I used SoftRAID 5 to format an external disk. (I'm not sure why I did this, but there you are). The disk is mounted on an eSATA docking station with a Thunderbolt-eSATA converter. It turns out that formatting an unformatted disk using SoftRAID results in a disk that is subtly different than one formatted by Disk Utility. Some of these differences are only noticeable with 3d party apps, but two that can be seen with Apple's programs are
The SoftRAID Icon is shown next to the disk in Disk Utility in place of the standard orange disk icon.
Time Machine does not recognize this disk as an ejectable disk, and assumes it should back it up unless you tell it otherwise. (Time Machine's default behavior appears to be to try to back up all "internal" disks and no "external" disks unless told otherwise.
It is actually issues with the 3-party apps that are bothering me, but describing them would just be a distraction in this question. FWIW, I see exactly the same issues with a Thunderbolt RAID that I formatted through SoftRAID (items 1 and 2 above apply).
I can't seem to get rid of the SoftRAID low-level format using Disk Utility—no matter what options I choose, the SoftRAID icon is retained.
I think what I would like to do is return the disk to the state it was in when I bought it—an "unformatted" disk—and then format it using Disk Utility. Any thoughts on how to achieve this? I tried using the diskutil command line interface, but it didn't seem to help.

I tried a recipe supplied by the developers of SoftRAID, but it didn't work. I was finally able to get rid of the SoftRAID format by adding this disk to a RAID (using Disk Utility) and then erasing it. There were a lot of steps in between, some of which were very confusing, but the problem is solved in case anyone else needs to do this.

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ppauley wrote:
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Message was edited by: georgebrobinson
Message was edited by: georgebrobinson

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How to reformat disk "like new" ("unformat" a disk)?

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