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Not sure how to approach this problem.

We have 3 external HDDs: 2TB Fantom, 2TB and 4TB G-Drives. Manual backups, no automated/software. We each use 1 and use the 4TB for a duplicate backup of both smaller ones - safety in data redundancy, right? They worked perfectly several months ago, which was the last time we used them. They sit on the shelves in 2 different rooms.

Today, one of them didn't mount, so we tried the other ones... NONE of the 3 are mounting on either of our computers (PC Win7) no matter what we do.

No drive label is assigned and the drives cannot be accessed. However, they are visible as working fine and "healthy" in Device Manager and in Disk Management, where it shows the correct size - but 100% free space (as in no data on it).

USB flash drives and an external DVD drive do mount successfully on both PCs.

I realize that this usually means the file indexing is corrupted, which can happen when disconnecting during data transfer / not ejecting first. But I ejected at least mine properly last time. So why now all 3 of them at once?

There are no earthquakes here, and something as crazy as an EMP would have damaged our laptops and USB flash drives as well, all of which are fine.

We ran antivirus scans. The only possible thing I can think of is that one of our computers never has recognized the second HDD that came installed in it - it doesn't have a drive letter and it shows in Disk Mgmt as mostly unpartitioned, but since we didn't need that much space anyhow, we just left it. Could there be some sort of file error or corrupting process that "spread" to the external HDDs?

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    Try the answer here: superuser.com/questions/518634/… - chkdsk without a drive letter...
    – Kinnectus
    May 24, 2015 at 8:25
  • Thanks, we'll look into that this evening. Beyond just recovering this data, I'm concerned about this happening again - could it be the computer's fault? We tried 4 different USB cables...
    – DoctorWhom
    May 24, 2015 at 20:25

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