external hard drives

I have two external hard drives I used on two different computers. On both computers I backed up all information onto the external hard drives before installing windows 10 on both computers. I was running windows 7 on both computers before the installation. On both computers I cannot get the computers to recognize the external hard drives when plugged in the USB. All USB plugs work with anything else plugged in.
I done a search in the forum and found many other people had the same problem. I went through all the advise given and none of advise worked for me. After about 16 hours of actual working time trying to get the information from my external hard drives I am at a loss and desperate. I am loosing money every day my backup is not connected.

My question is: can I take the hard drive disk out of the external hard drive and buy a hard drive cradle and try to see if my computers will read my backup that way.
The information on these external hard drives is too important to lose. That is why I am asking before I take the external hard drives apart.

Welcome to TenForums @kaju

kaju said:

My question is: can I take the hard drive disk out of the external hard drive and buy a hard drive cradle and try to see if my computers will read my backup that way.

Not if they are WD external drives, WD directly solders the drive into the unit. See the pictures here...
portable hard drive, seagate or western digit of better quality build?

Anyway, that is unlikely to be the problem as both drives were apparently working before the upgrade to 10. To help further, plug both drives into one of the PCs, then post screenshots of Device Manager with the disk drive section expanded, and of Disk Manager.

Disk Management - How to Post a Screenshot of
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I have not opened the external hard drives yet. I do not want to mess up anything. I do not even know what they look like. If they are the big type to go into a desktop or if they are the small type to go into a laptop. One computer is a laptop the other is a desktop.

Josey Wales said:

If they are sealed then what Bree said is correct. My external drive is a WD but it is in a Rockwell HD enclosure that allows me to remove it. Try removing as many devices out of your PC's USB ports and then try the drive in each port that is available. In device manager does it show any ? or errors?

Yes I have tried that and there were no errors.

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

Have you tried the drives on a third computer to make sure they're ok?

If you don't have any access to a third one, you could try a linux live disc. If they work, you could at least copy the files until a proper solution is found.

I have 2 Iomega (USB3) drives that worked on 7 and will not work on 10. They still work (on the same hardware) when running MacOS or Linux. Windows 10 definitely has an issue with some brands of USB3 drives (whereas the Intel driver on 7 was more relaxed). I find they do still work on USB2 but some of my laptops don't have USB2 ports.

They also work when I unplug the actual disk and plug into a different enclosure (I didn't buy a new enclosure I just swap the disks around in the various external drives I have).

Like @Bree said that may not work if they are WD and the drive is soldered to the enclosure but in my experience it is worth a go. If you open it and can pull out the sata cable you can stick the drive in something else and try. It certainly works for me and it doesn't mean your drive is bad.

I have a WDC 2.0TB SATA drive in front of me that came out of an External USB case, works just fine in a 2-drive BlacX dock I frequently use to recover data from IBM Travelstar [spun off to Hitachi now HGST], WDC, Seagate and Maxtor drives. As has been mentioned it was the PCB interface that died. The added PCB on those was not soldered to the drives interface [IDE]. I've taken several apart up to that 2.0TB to reclaim the drive without problems but they were the WDC My Book models, maybe the smaller WDC Passports do it differently. I also use USB adapter kits to access PATA drives from older computers.