Solid State drives, 1TB now under $150.

Sub $50 for a 250 gig one, which is adequate for a basic surfing/utility box.

I reckon I got my money's worth out of both of them but surprised they both bit the dust from the same thing in such a short time. I'm just not interested in messing with them or using Linux.
I've moved on, especially from Windows, but it still puzzles me.

It can happen but it could be something environmental.

Spinning disk drives don’t like mechanical shock or temperature extremes. Even when powered off but that’s more forgiving. I don’t think they are more sensitive to electric shock than other components but im not sure.

Other harsh conditions or contaminants could be a factor.

Or you might have ticked off some tech support person and they smote your hardware with their god like powers (yeah right).

so they weren't moved and when I would use them, one at a time, it would be on a laptop cooler and also I had a small external fan blowing on them.
I had noticed that if I would power them off I would have trouble when I powered on again and wished I had just left it on.

Years ago I had a Mac Mini that crashed and burned just weeks after its warranty expired and then my old desktop died the next week so I've been through this before.
Luckily I had an external hard drive that saved my data this time.

removing back cover, one or two screws and one cable on the HD, and slip a new one in. reverse. you can get small spinning lappie drives for $50. then restore to the new HD.

however, that does require good backups that image the whole Windows install, not just files. like acronis or macrium reflect (which has a great free version to do this).

sounds like you're good but for anyone else ...

Unmountable means that the disk was detected, but that the files on it were corrupted to a point that the filesystem was not able to be "mounted" and made available.

It may not be a sign of a failed hard drive. E.g. a really nasty Windows bug or a really nasty Windows virus could scribble random bits on the disk and cause this failure.

Here's on tutorial on what "might" help

Another thing to try is to just erase the disk and try re-installing windows again.

Given that you had multiple failures like this fairly quickly, I'm tending toward guessing you had some malware that hosed your systems. Of course, that's just a guess.

Good luck!

I've already spent a lot of frustrating hours trying to deal with this problem with limited computer abilities. It's too bad it happened to both at the same time, but both laptops were old and inexpensive and personally for me they're not worth any more bother.
I have all of my data from my Windows 7 laptop saved on an SSD external drive and that's all I want.
I am now using an inexpensive Chromebook and that's really all that I need.

I understand ... I ditched Windows (for the most part) for Macs a few decades ago. And Chromebooks are even easier.

Btw -- just remember that the "cloud" is just another name for somebody else's computer. I'd still make local backups of anything important to you. But I suspect you know that

Cheers!

I had a Mac Mini years ago that crashed and burned within weeks of its warranty expiring and ironically, just like this time, my Windows computer died the same week.
The reality is that I don't do much of anything more than surf the web anyhow. In the month I've had the Chromebook I haven't even downloaded any apps.

On the unmountable boot volume problem, my laptops seemed to be ok if I did not shut them down at night. It was when I powered up the next morning that I would experience problems.
It's still a bugger to me why both crashed and burned so closely together.