External Firewire 800 Disk Utility Erase / Formatting issues in 2024

I've got a ton of old external drives there were erased and reformatted a few years that mount and show empt, but I wanted to reformat and check over before giving them away or whatever - but I keep running into issues. They are old external Firewire 800 drives (WD and Iomega tried so far, but I have others like more WD, Seagate etc) but Disk Utility keeps crashing and throwing errors. So far, I've tried

• Powerbook G7 running 10.4.11 directly with FW800 port
• MacBook Pro 2015 running Mojave with a FW800 to Thunderbolt adapter

I have 2023 M2 MacBook Pro too that I haven't tried, not even sure how I would do it - maybe a Thunderbolt 3 to female Thunderbolt adapter? I don' think I'm interested in more dongles for this as I'm phasing all the old gear out.

Is accessing these drives just not possible? or did my drives brick sitting in storage? Not sure what to try next other than shucking the drives and tossing them into USB-C enclosures?

Any help or direction would be amazing