Iain wrote

I'm trying to read some old SATA drives using a Liteon Ultra enclosure.
windows disk management (Win10 Pro)
sees the disk but says it needs to be initialised,

Thats saying that it looks like it isnt formatted.

but trying to initialise as MBR fails.

Likely because that drive has died.

Any ideas as to how to procede?

If it has died, you're stuffed.