external hard drives

Bree said:

We need further information, otherwise it's all just a guess. A screenshot of Disk Management with both drives connected would be a start.

This would help a great deal.

On the left lower corner of each post there is a my computer arrow.
1) Please click on this arrow > click on update your system specs and add second system so we can see information about the laptop and desktop.
How To Fill Out Your System Specs:
How To Fill Out Your System Specs
System Specs - Fill in at Ten Forums:
System Specs - Fill in at Ten Forums Windows 10 General Tips Tutorials
System Info - See Your System Specs - Windows 7 Help Forums

2) When you updated from Windows 7 to Windows 10 was the first update to 1703 or had these drives been working with 1511 or 1607 before upgrading to 1703?

3) Looking at probabilities having two drives go bad and become totally unreadable at the same time is very low on the list unless they were both dropped on the floor. Higher on the probabilities is that there is a driver or compatibility issue. Please confirm that the drives were never in a RAID configuration.

4) Please let us know whether the drives are readable on another windows 10 computer.

5) And if possible the best test is to see if they are readable on any windows 7.0 or 8.1 computer. Maybe a friend or local business is still using windows 7.0. Please let us know whether you can test the external drives in this fashion and if you can please post the results into the thread.

6) For the rest of the steps please connect both external drives to the same computer and make sure that they are connected using USB 2.0 ports (black) (not USB 3.0 ports (blue))

7) First turn each computer off and with the 2 external drives attached to USB 2.0 ports boot to the bios and see whether they are recognized in the bios. Some computers (HP computers) have bios UEFI diagnostics to check hard drives. If you can check the drives using the diagnostics please do so. Some drive testers can only work on internal drives and others can work on external drives. For HP I don't remember whether the UEFI diagnostics can check external drives but its worth a shot.

8) please use a camera or a smart phone camera to take bios pictures of the drives and post images into the thread for each the laptop and the desktop.

9) Open disk management and post an image into the thread (both external hard drives attached to USB 2.0 ports) for each the laptop and the desktop.

10) Open device manager > click view > click show hidden devices > look for the disk drives > expand to view internal and external drives or any yellow triangular icons and post images from each computer with both drives attached to USB 2.0 ports into the thread.

11) Open file explorer > this PC > with both drives attached to USB 2.0 ports post images from each computer into the thread

12) Open control panel > large or small icons > troubleshooting > left pane click view all > run hardware and device troubleshooter while both external drivers are connected to USB 2.0 ports > view detailed information > post into the thread images of anything that was fixed or could not be fixed.

13) In summary please post images of each the bios, disk management, device manager, and file explorer with both external hard drives attached to USB 2.0 ports.

14) If the drives can be seen on the computers and if they work on any other computer then driver or compatibility issues can be troubleshooted