@ Greybeard
When you format a drive, sure some default values will be pushed onto the drive fat 32 ntfs etc .... GPT is the new gimmick to be able to BOOT on BIG drives
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_TableBut normally a good dock, will follow the drive formatting and access it, multi partitions too ....
BUT if it's a Mac drive or Linux partitions, say in windows you need to have the proper tools / and drivers etc ... or other os'es, and theses can play small tricks, sometimes Windows will not show them ...
And when this happens you need software who will access the drive in
raw mode and do recover or clone etc .. once again you have to get the proper SW for that, and they don't work all the same way ...
Same for hardware, if you work with older stuff, you'll get hardware limitations too, controller side, capacity ... motherboards ..
I have a bunch of ide to sata / sata to ide drives cards, who are able to read old drives
Ebay few bucks $$$ china junk, who work pretty well some PCI slot promise ata (IDE) cards usb docks ... usb floppies, but dont do 720k
I had to restart an very old TEK scope (20-25 years) with Win98, WinME, Win2k would crash, boy it was a nightmare finding all the needed stuff, motherboad locked out ... floppies in 2024
? using some "plop" boot disk to install usb drivers at a DOS level ?? and finding genuine CD-Roms was a nightmare too, no burned iso's would work ...
And yes the infamous
do you want to format the drive may happen, witch i do refuses right away
if the mbr is bad / defective, that's another story
As for your dock story, i never saw that behavior, and i would say try to find another dock, and buy a more recent one who at least goes beyond 4 TB, there are at 8TB or 12TB models
Sorry to say, but as i wrote earlier, i recover very old drives with an WAVLINK or my IOcrest 8 slot tower, they certify 48 bit lba ... and do 4tb and up
even old 4 8 20 30 40 80 gig models worked very well ? i have a drawer full of drives 2.5" 3.5" ide and sata 1 sata 2
BUT for your problems i can not say, it can / could happen to me too, there is so many things who can go wrong ...
As for
@fzabkar link for usb enclosures who change specs, i never experienced that
i would say: the usb chip / interface is not good enough,
but when it is possible, i always connect to the motherboard IDE or SATA interface, never use any external interface(s) unless in deep sh@@$
The drives i use right now are : swapped between the dock / tower / and hot-swap caddies in my computer, formatted by win 7 win 10 win 11 i have no problems at all and between computers too ?? maybe i'm lucky ?