And just so you know, I have a special tool that allows me to run any sort of hard drive (3.5", 2.5", SATA, whatever) external of the PC, to format it, or transfer data, or troubleshoot, and I formatted and re-formatted the 2.5 hdd I had (off the list) as FAT, FAT 32 and I even tried ntfs as a long shot...but nothing worked.

As I said I think the interface was stuffed on mine, so you might have better luck.