[SOLVED] Having issues connecting an (ex-)laptop HDD to my computer with a SATA adapter

[Urzipperisdown]

Greetings! I've been in quite a pickle for the last few hours, any help would be awesome!
Here's the situation: my last laptop died around one month ago (hardware failure, probably something with the alim and/or short-circuits), I pulled out its SSD and HDD, both still in pristine condition and working fine until their very last minute of duty. Thing is my last data backup dated back to a few weeks and I had some important files to retrieve. I was pretty confident I could pull it off since I had already recovered data from an old überdead HDD before (filesystem fucked up, the whole thingy going in RAW format, etc.) buuut apparently a perfectly working drive is proving to be a bigger challenge! So I took out my good ol' SATA adapter, plugged in what was to be plugged in and that's when everything started.. not starting.

The HDD model is a Samsung ST1000LM024, HN-M101MBB/AS2 (SATA 2.5), my OS is Windows 10 64-bit (version 1903, build 18362.239).

Here's the adapter I'm using:

Here's the beast in action (I've triple-checked every cable, port, connection).

And here are some screens of what little information I was able to gather.
Firstly, the adapter is recognized (as is the drive in its properties) in Devices and Printers, however the drive doesn't appear under "This PC".

In Device Manager the drive is listed as using MBR, whereas in Disk Management it's listed as using GPT (also 16384 GB, dude's trippin).

Finally, within DiskPart the drive appears in disks but not in volume.

I'm at a loss.
Let's get technical boys!

 

[popatim]

Nothing to get technical about. It's locked by the more secure GPT partition system most likely because you've attached it via USB.

Do you have a win10 desktop you can install it in?

 

[Urzipperisdown]

Negative.

 

[fzabkar]

Can you show us the Partitions window in DMDE?

https://dmde.com/

ICBW, but I suspect that your adapter may be configured for a sector size of 4KB. This would make your drive look 8x larger than it is. So the reported GPT size of 16 TiB would really be 2TiB which is the default size of the protective MBR in a GPT setup.

 

[Urzipperisdown]

That's quite a hunch! Here it is:

 

[fzabkar]

DMDE is reporting a size of 244190646 sectors for your drive.

• 244190646 sectors x 4096 bytes per sector = 1TB

This confirms that your adapter is configured with a sector size of 4KB. You should have access to your data if you install the drive in a 512B environment, eg inside your desktop PC.

 

[Urzipperisdown]

Alrighty! All I got lying around is an old Windows XP 32-bit desktop PC. I guess I'll need to convert my HDD from GPT to MBR, but I don't know how to do that without data loss. There are tons of programs offering that option out there but none I'm familiar with. Do you know of any that could do the trick?

 

[fzabkar]

It's not a matter of converting from GPT to MBR. The problem is that you have a 512e file system on a 4Kn drive, for want of a better description. The only real solution is to install the drive in a 512e environment. Try to find another adapter that is configured for a 512-byte sector size.

Otherwise, double-click the DATA partition and expand the Root. Do you see your file/folder structure?

 

[Urzipperisdown]

Oh yeah I got the 512-bytes/4KiB situation, loud and clear, don't worry! But I did have to convert to MBR since Windows XP is unable to access GPT partitions and this computer was the only other piece of hardware having any usable SATA port I could get my hand on. I was fairly confident the old codger would be using 512-bytes sectors. It did, all solved now! I used a partition edition software, converted to MBR, rebooted, allocated a letter to the drive and lo and behold the HDD's now FULLY READY TO ROCK THE CASBAH!
Thanks a whole fat bunch Fzabkar! Another mission accomplished, let's return to base and savor the sweet taste of victory o7