Hard Drive not visible in disk utility or terminal after failed format.

(Please bear the long background, I want to explain all of the events that lead up to this problem)

I have bought a hard drive for my MacBook Pro 15” (Early 2009). I am running MacOS Catalina 10.15 on this laptop. The drive is a Seagate Laptop Thin HDD, 500gb (Model Number is ST500LM021). When I plugged it in initially with a USB to SATA drive adapter it showed up in disk utility and I tried to format it as APFS. The format failed due to not being able to mount the disk and I ran First Aid, which succeeded. I then proceeded to attempt to format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), which also failed due to a mount error. I ran First Aid again, which reported success. I then tried to format the drive as ExFAT and FAT32, which also failed. I then tried to eject the drive, and it would not eject.

Frustrated with this, I disconnected the drive (without properly ejecting) and then installed the drive into a CD to SATA adapter internally. When I restarted the computer, the drive was not recognised in disk utility, but was visible in System Information. Since the drive was visible in System Information, I figured the drive must be hidden somewhere. I used the terminal command “diskutil list” and it was not listed. Frustrated once again, I left the drive connected, and after about 10 minutes it appeared as an uninitialised drive. I followed the prompt to initialise it, and opened disk utility. It now appeared, though still as an uninitialised drive. I tried First Aid, and it once again said the drive was OK. I then tried formatting in APFS, which failed once again. I attempted to format in MacOS Extended (Journaled), which failed again. I then attempted to format in ExFAT, and then FAT32 again, which failed again.

At this point I was completely exasperated, and settled on formatting it on another machine. I did First Aid (which still said the drive was OK) and tried to reformat in every available format (except NTFS) again on my MacBook Pro 13” (Mid 2009) running MacOS Monterey (12.2). Once again every attempt failed. I tried the same steps for a third time on my MacBook Air (Intel, 2020) and every attempt to format the drive failed for the fourth time.

At this point, I completely gave up on all of my Macs. I didn’t have any Windows computers at hand, but I did have a Chromebook in the house that I use for school. I booted the Chromebook up, and attempted to reformat into both FAT32 and ExFAT, neither worked. I then ejected the drive and put it aside. When I returned to the drive to attempt to retry formatting it, and plugged it back into my MacBook Pro (Early 2009), it would not appear in disk utility. When I reopened the terminal to invoke “diskutil list”, it wasn’t listed there either. At this point I have waited 2 hours for this hard drive to reappear, and it isn’t doing it.

My questions are mainly

A: Is the Hard Drive dead, or just corrupted?

B: If it’s dead, what killed it? It showed up fine in disk utility twice, and in System Information once. Was it the improper eject, or was it DOA?

C: If the drive is corrupted, is there any way to restore it to a working state?

D: Should I give up on this drive altogether?

Please help me with this one, I’ve just about lost my patience with this problem, given the many hours I’ve spent on it and the complete lack of solutions online.