My laptops all delete external hard drive names!!

[tenerifediver]

Ok, after 9 days of effing about, a call for help!
I have 10 external drives (Toshiba, WD, Tuoro, Samsung) all with films, music and training material. All were labelled - Tosh 1, Sammy 2, etc. All working fine for years. But then a week or so ago, all the names disappeared and just show drive letter! Except in Disk Management where the names are all there!
I've tried EVERYTHING! Formatting (full) and renaming via Explorer and Disk management. No change
Changing drive letters - No change
Renewing partition - No change
Checking ownership - No change
Antivirus sweeps (Panda and Malwarebytes) - Nothing.
The weird thing is, I have 3 laptops and they are all doing the same thing!!!! It's almost like all the HDDs have been "locked" for name change!
I am now desperate.
Any guru's out there with a solution?
Thanks

[BC_Programmer]

Show hidden files and check for an autorun.inf or autorun.ini files on those drives. Don't see how those would survive a reformat, but if you are copying files from it, formatting, and copying them back it could be included in the data that way.

If a label is specified in the autorun.inf file it will override any actual volume label for the drive for display in explorer. This include a blank label being set, I believe.

I won't even pretend to know how it might have been created. Many of my external drives have an autorun.inf file on them and I certainly never created it, though they are blank. I suspect some driver software updates might actually apply an autorun.inf in order to set the icon for flash drives and external drives; so a Windows update could conceivably install for example some WD software and that will add an autorun.inf that sets the icon and label as a "WD Passport" drive.