WD 750GB HDD won't erase or repartition, using external HDD enclosure, what am I doing wrong?

I have the late 2008 aluminum macbook running Mountain Lion with the original 250gb hard drive, and the hard drive's been sitting at over 90% full for months. I've been needing to upgrade it for a while, so I bought a 2.5" WD Scorpio Black 7200 rpm 750GB HDD and a StarTech 2.5" External Hard Drive Enclosure (SAT251OU2).
Once inserted into the enclosure and plugged with USB into the mac, a green light on the enclosure comes on and a message comes up reading "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer." and gives me the options to Intialize..., Ignore, or Eject. To allow for the Disk Utility to see the disk, I press the Intialize...
When I run disk utility and select the 750.16 GB WDC WD75 ... HD and run erase: format Mac OS Extended (Journaled), or Partition the Drive (has a disk2s2 partition by default) to 1 Partition with the option of GUID Partition Table (and Mac OS Extended (Journaled)) and hit apply, the disk utility will run for about 30 seconds, while reading Formatting (default partition name) disk2s2 as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with name [name I specified].
The light on the external enclosure changes from green to amber when the formatting starts, then about 20 seconds in a message stating "Partition failed, Partition failed with the error: File system formatter failed," and a hard drive click sound occurs, the enclosure's lights blink green and amber (or red) for a few seconds, then shortly afterwards a message reads, "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" with a prompt allowing me to again start the process over: Intialize..., Ignore or Eject.
How can I format this disk and use it with my mac? I was hoping to clone my original hard drive.
HDD: Western Digital WD Scorpio Black 750 GB SATA 3 GB/s 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache Internal Bulk/OEM 2.5-Inch Mobile Hard Drive
Enclosure: StarTech.com 2.5in Silver USB 2.0 External Hard Drive Enclosure for SATA HDD

Any ideas on how to get the HDD to format, or whether it's a bad enclosure or hard drive?

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