External enclosure won't accept different hard drives

Hello, so to better understand my problem, I recently bought an HDD external enclosure for a hard drive that has some old family memories on it. I hooked it up, closed it and connected it to my Windows 10 laptop. My anti-virus scanned for problems, and there were no problems and I was able to access all of the family files. Then, I wanted to get some other files from my other laptops that were dead. So I took that hard drive out, and replaced it with the one I plan to get some more files off of. When I plugged it in, it didn't recognize it. It wouldn't even show up in Windows Explorer. I tried another hard drive, and it did the same thing. But when I plug back in my family files hard drive, it worked just fine. So do I have to have other external enclosures for this to recognize my other drives? Really need this fix, thank you.

That problem is reminiscent of DOS and Win3.xx days where a change of floppy disks wasn't recognized, usually had to shut down the computer [to clear its 'mind'], remove the disk then try again.

Caledon Ken said:

Hi MrKnifeGod. Welcome to the TenForums @MrKnifeGod

Could I suggest plugging in one of the drives that is not recognized. Then right click on Start and then left on Disk Management.

Does the drive appear? It may not have a letter in which case you will have to assign a letter. Right click on the disk, you should see option in context menu.


Ken

Wow it worked. Thanks a lot!