Credit: A Video from Linus Tech Tips reminded me of a way to stop Windows 7/10 from automounting drives

If you have an issue with a hard drive (That is spinning up, doesn’t sound like its head is craching/clicking and a SMART tool like CrystalDiskInfo Standard edition shows its healthy) that simply appears to hang your machine/take forever to mount, Windows can annoy you by attempting to mount drives. Windows can be told not to mount new drives so it can be told to not mount and forget older external drives which were plugged in.
This is useful if you want to drive and image the drive with software (If you don’t have a stand alone duplicator).

diskpart
automount disable
automount scrub
exit

Autoscrub disable means you don’t have to modify the windows registry.
Automount scrub means you don’t have to remove the device from device manager (Often a pain with lots of external drives)

Obviously afterwards re-enable to restore default functionality

diskpart
automount enable
exit