You could try booting from a Gparted live disk and going to Device > Create Partition Table and see if that works. It works for me when I run into that but only with hard drives that are completely wiped (which is usually the replacements I get from Dell warranty repair). I have at least one machine I can't figure out how to image because no matter what this error comes up and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of documentation on that error.