If I plug in a SATA HDD via adapter cable Sabrent USB-DSC5, a "Healthy RAW partition" is displayed: Now, if I connect the HDD using internal SATA ports, then it shows a normal partitioning: The adapter is new and when I contacted the manufacturer they told me it was my HDD not compatible with the adapter. This sounds very stupid and really unbelievable cause I tested with two other drives and same issue. Strangely if I use a IDE HDD (old one) there's no issues at all. It can be seen either via internal IDE connector or the Sabrent adapter. Conversely and even more strange is when I plug in the HDD and format it via the Sabrent adapter, it shows the right partitioning but when I plug the HDD into the internal SATA connectors it shows as RAW.
I think there is some problem with the adapter, which seems not to be a recent design. I´d try with a newer, USB 3.0-compatible one. SATA-USB adapters are inexpensive and very useful when they work well. But they are somewhat fragile, in my experience. I don´t expect them to last much time. And sometimes there are compatibility issues with the SATA-USB chip.