Partition corruption external HD on USB dock

[mrnike]

Hi folks,
i'm having a problem with all the 3,5" 3TB drives i've been using with my USB docking station. It looks like the partition (table?) is corrupt.
Each drive had initially one 3tb GPT partition when plugged to the USB docking station. When i plugged them into my other USB external enclosure (not docking station), 2 partitions showed up. One 2048Go GPT protection partition and the other 746.52 Go unallocated.



After selecting EFI GPT (instead of automatically proposed Intel) the analyse returned "Bad GPT Partition. Invalid signature"



Then a quick search returned "number of bytes per sector mismatches: 4096 (NTFS) ! = 512 (HD)"



I'm totally stuck, as i'm a noobie in that field.

Any help to get back my partition without loosing my datas would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

[recuperation]

What operating system is being used?
Where do your disks with 3 TB come from?
What did you do before the problem showed up?

[mrnike]

Strange... I wrote a long reply, couple of days ago, but it never got posted...
Well, then i'm gonna do it short this time:

What operating system is being used?

Winddows 10 LTSC

Where do your disks with 3 TB come from?

There were previously used as backup drives, mounted in a desktop for back up and then removed for storage.

What did you do before the problem showed up?

I plugged them in an USB Dock and attached to a laptop to download files. I formatted the drive attached to the dock before the files download.
Them i plugged it in a 3.5" USB external hard drive enclosure on another laptop. That where the partitioning problem occurred.
P.S. I used the USB enclosure to download other files and then plug it in the other laptop, with no problem.

Thanks

[recuperation]

Explication 1

The warning labeled

Warning: number of bytes per sector mismatches 4096 (NTFS) != 512 (HD).

that can be seen in your picture, suggests that your disk had been installed in an enclosure that contained an interface that emulated a sector size of 4096 bytes, although the hard disk showed only 512 bytes at its interface.

When the affected partition partition was formated it recorded a sector size of 4096.

The intention of using such interfaces by the manufacturer had been to make big disks (beyond 2GB) usable for people with legacy operating systems such as Windows XP 32 bit which only supports the MBR partition structure. As the MBR partition table contains only 32 bit values to keep sector numbers. Given a sector size of 512 byte the MBR partition table could only address a space of 2^32 * 512 bytes ~= 2 TB.
A disk with a sector size of 4096 bytes, though, (8 times bigger) could address 16 TB instead.

Explication 2

Another explication is that data was stored on a disk with a sector size of 4096 bytes where the size of 4096 byte was recorded in NTFS.
If that disk is cloned onto a disk with a sector size of 512 bytes I would expect similar problems.

[mrnike]

Thank you for your explanations, that makes sense.
Do you whether there is a way to get my partition system to work on all enclosures ?
Thanks

[recuperation]

No.