Win 10 losing contact with hard drive

That was the Win 7 drive that crashed, forcing me to Win 10, so I'm not shocked if I lose it.
It will be a shame to lose that drive, but I'm only using it for backups.
But it's a lot of convenient on board storage to lose. I'd use more if I could be sure it was reliable.

In the old days you could format around defects, but I'm pretty sore that's not an option.

I run everything off my C drive, and USB sticks for backups (which I also use) are fairly cheap these days.
There are even 2 TB ones, that is more than all my data and then some. Not to mention the cloud.

My attitude is always think of disaster recovery. But if I can I want to save that drive.

A smart warning is a predictor of disk failure. Best avoid the hassle and dump it.

At any rate, thank you *very* much for helping get my system independent of the old drive.
That was the *real* problem.

And of course helping me understand what was going on.

Going forward, I will do my backups elsewhere and generally stay off it..

Slapping the new drive into the machine with was an emergency quick fix.
The next big purchase will be a new machine, not repairing the bad drive.



As you can see, no big hurry.

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SIW2 said:

A smart warning is a predictor of disk failure. Best avoid the hassle and dump it.

Just one last question:

Is there a way to do a "virtual disconnect"?
That is to say, make the operating system act like the bad drive doesn't exist at all (without physically removing the hardware)?

Thank you.

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Figured it out. Done. The bad drive started failing a lot.

But I couldn't have reached this point without help from here.

Can't thank you enough.