Using internal hard drive as external hard drive via HP SimpleSave SATA to miniUSB converter board

[Herpahermaderp]

A while back I bought an HP SimpleSave external hard drive. I had accidentally dropped the device and the case broke off, so now all I have is the hard drive and the board that converts the connection from SATA to USB. Now, I have 3 other hard drives that were used in laptops over the years that have been extracted from the machines as they have all gone bad. I have removed the OS from each of them via an Ubuntu LiveUSB installation, set up primary partitions encompassing all of the data on the drives, and formatted them all to FAT. However, when I removed the hard drive that came inside the SimpleSave from the board and connect one of the other hard drives, it is listed as a CD Drive instead of an external storage device. Is there anyway to fix this? I would rather not have to invest in an external hard drive case, but if there is no solution then I guess that is the only option.

On Windows, Disk Management lists the hard drives as such:

Spoiler

Disk 1
Unknown
<HDD Size>
Not Initialized

Attempting to initialize the HDD with either MBR or GPT gives me the message "Access is denied." The program MiniTool Partition Wizard Free lists the hard drives like so:

Spoiler

Basic MBR
<HDD Size>
(Bad Disk)

With none of the options being made available for the hard drive. When the clean drive is plugged into the system loaded with the Ubuntu LiveUSB via the SimpleSave board, similar errors occur. Gparted lists the device as having no partition, despite having just partitioned it not 30 minutes ago. When it first loads it has a popup that says "Libparted Bug Found! Input/output error during read on /dev/sdb". When I right click the drive and select "New", another popup shows, saying "No partition table found on device /dev/sdb. A partition table is required before partitions can be added. To create a new partition table choose the menu item: Device --> Create Partition Table." When I go to create a partition table, I click apply and yet another popup comes up, this time saying "Libparted Bug Found! Input/output error during read on /dev/sdb". When "Ignore" is clicked a popup says "Libparted Bug Found! Input/output error during write on /dev/sdb". However, when the HDD is plugged into the system's SATA drive, Gparted reads the drive just fine, listing the partition as NTFS (I had formatted as FAT?) with full read+write access to the drive. It is locked, however, and I am unable to change the partition or format the drive.

 

[drtweak]

So me it sounds like the USB adapter may have busted when you dropped it. If the drives work fine in the PC's but not using the External USB adapter then yea the USB adapter is the issue not the drives or OS