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Some WD drive products (drive combined with enclosures) are using encryption.
I have no clue which mechanism makes them output unencrypted data.

Therefore it might be worth trying to run Photorec with the drive in its original setting - inside the original enclosure using the USB interface.

31.10.2020 18:21 corrected sentence

recuperation wrote: 31 Oct 2020, 00:41 Some WD drive products (drive combined with enclosures) are using encryption.
I have no clue which mechanism makes them output unencrypted data.

Therefore it might be worth trying to run Photorec with the drive begin in its original setting - inside the original enclosure using the USB interface.

Connected via USB, quick scan comes back with a partition that says "MSData" that is only 2TB space which is approximately what was actually used, and it seems to recognize the name I had on it previously, which is a good sign, but again it shows MSData instead of NTFS....

recuperation wrote: 31 Oct 2020, 00:41 Some WD drive products (drive combined with enclosures) are using encryption.
I have no clue which mechanism makes them output unencrypted data.

Therefore it might be worth trying to run Photorec with the drive begin in its original setting - inside the original enclosure using the USB interface.

I believe this was the key, without the USB adapter connected directly via SATA, it was unrecoverable... But when checked and rescued via USB, it was able to recover the full 3TB partition, and chkdsk came back 100% clean. As a test after recovering the partition, I plugged back in via direct SATA and the partition was gone again, so it appears there is something with the WD USB adapter that keeps it from being accessed directly.

Thank you for your assistance, I am now rescuing everything and backing up to the new 4TB drive.