So this happened. Two separate drives, wipe one the other went

Little more digging, found this app from Gigabyte... it's an App Center and guess what's included free..... Easy Tune! It's got an area for the BIOS so HOPEFULLY this is will resolve that need.

NOPE, directs me to the Gigabyte website!

It does provide a handy list for the BIOS though, so I won't have to struggle to find that info..

For Gigabyte there may be an error message when using Windows related to bit (64x vs 32x)

See if any of these are useful:

Here is the first test, Sea Tools screen grab. I see a few fails there but I think I didn't know what I was clicking and selected all the recovery partitions too. I do have 7 active drives though and only 6 passed so there is ONE of those that is a drive in use but there are no tools that I can see that allows me to like right click for more info or anything like that. I'll leave the Sea Tools window up if your still around and can give me a clue if there are tools I can investigate more which of these 7 drives/partitions if there is anything that can be done from the Sea Tools application.

Thanks for all your help and patience with my ignorance to all this...

There are multiple types of drive tests:

SMART
Benchmark
Full error scan
Long generic
Chkdsk
etc.

Tests can be repeated as needed.

A Sea Tools long generic failure is an industry standard for warranty replacement.

It's best that you backup any important data and replace these drives.

Drives can be used until the terminal event as long as data is backed up.

Before the terminal event there may be problems with slow read or write, hangs, freezes, BSOD, etc.



Continue with HD Tune tests.


Other software drive tests can be used as needed.

Post #17 displayed drive J:.

This drive was not displayed on Disk Management in post #8.

How come disk management did not display all disk drives?

Please post a new image of disk management displaying all disk drives.

a) widen columns: Volume and Status > make sure that no characters are cut off

b) widen rows: Disk 0, disk 1, disk 2, disk 3, disk 4, etc. > make sure that no characters are cut off


Download and install Minitool partition wizard > click launch > post images into this thread

I think the J drive, which is the new external drive I JUST received not 3 days ago is a enterprise drive from Western Digital, nothing is on it as of yet. I think part of the issue with these softwares is they notate ALL of the partitions it finds including all the recovery partitions. It would be nice to have a way to exclude those in scenarios like this to simplify things.

I'm having the same issue with the partition manager software you asked me to install. The J drive is cut off at the bottom

Two things:

1) You can resize the areas in disk management to maximize what is shown in it:

2) Even if you cannot physically rotate your monitor, you can set it to portrait mode and make Windows think that you have - and then capture long flies like so:



It's a bit tricky to maneuver like that, but once you get the screenshot taken just go back into Windows settings and change it back to landscape mode.

HTH

@zbook is the resident partition expert, and understands it better than anyone around here, but if I was dealing with such a complicated partition scheme, and was trying to recover deleted data, I would go old school and deal with only one disk at a time, getting the others off the mobo connections. If you are inadvertantly running some sort of raid setup, there's a chance having the disks installed will over-write the data you are trying to recover. All those recovery and efi partitions complicate the picture. I have found an external hard drive dock to be an invaluable tool. But that's just me, I'm totally old school. Good luck.

Well I had an epiphany about all this. Since this is a new system I had allot of the default settings for the drives. So I had to not only change the USB settings to always be on but then there were some drive options under the Device Manager that seems to have fixed all the issues I was having. So it seems that when I changed the removal policy to what you see below no more grinding and disconnects and other strange happenings. I also have a backup set up so that's all being done automatically.

Honestly all these tests I got a bit overwhelmed and it all seemed a bit overboard. Considering both drives that were giving me issues were fairly new (for me) and they are both Enterprise type drives (these are used by big companies so they are pretty solid in how they operate). Not to say that even an enterprise drive can't fail but I wasn't picking that up from what was going on, it seemed there were some settings that were not quite right through Windows. So after some searching around I found this page on the WWW: Fix External Hard Drive Keeps Disconnecting in Windows 11/10/8/7

I will still do the tests for those two drives that were giving me guff but the full error scans for both drives came up perfect, no issues. So I think this issue is probably resolved. Yea, I lost allot of info but it's not the end of the world for me. It's just an inconvenience and it's kept me from my Jon project for L'Homme but now I think I can get back to getting that finished.

Thanks for the help!

Each of the drive tests may test different parameters.
So a drive can fail on one and pass on another.
Also some of the tests are to predict failure which may be inaccurate.
For example HD Tune, HD Sentinel, Crystal Disk, etc. may have different scoring systems for alerts, cautions, warnings, scores, etc.

If you were to contact HP or Dell or Lenovo, etc. they would want to know the results of the Sea Tools long generic test or long DST.
These are the tests typically used for warranty replacement.