Best of Luck, Jeff
Have you moved your computer recently? You might have dislodged drive connections. "My Computer" should show you if the drives are connected.
Your portable hard drives...USB? If so, you might want to check cables and the USB ports themselves. I had a USB port on a notebook fail several years ago and was unable to connect to my external drive with that port.
Have you tried using some of the trouble shooting procedures in the control panel? If your system was OK and you could see the drives, try going back to an earlier reset point. If you have access to another computer, you might see if that computer recognizes the drives. That for sure would isolate the problem between computer and drives. If you have a memory stick, you can also check your USB connections as Windows should recognize one if plugged in. I know that with Linux, one needs to unmount a drive before removing it. You might try pulling the USB cables from your drive, boot into Windows and then plug in one of your external drives instead of booting with them plugged in.
If I think of anything more, will post again.
jack
In theory windows 7 should happily recognize them and use them....that is unless the file systems are incompatible for instance.
You really need to provide more info: how are they connected, what happened just before the problem arose (working-turned off and next boot, stopped working), etc. What have you done to try to fix your problem. Need data.
