How to mount and unmount hard drives under Windows (the unix way)

Remove the drive letters using mountvol or diskmgmt.msc. Without a drive letter, they won't appear under Computer or Send To.

mountvol Q: /p

Using /p will actually dismount the device. On older Windows versions, you only have /d, which only unassigns the drive letter, but keeps the volume mounted.

Reassign when needed, using the volume ID printed by mountvol:

mountvol Q: \\?\Volume{1be3da43-6602-11e0-b9e6-f11e1c50f5b5}\

You can also mount the volume on an empty folder (Unix style) using the same tools:

mkdir C:\fs\backup-disk
mountvol C:\fs\backup-disk \\?\Volume{1be3da43-6602-11e0-b9e6-f11e1c50f5b5}\

All these operations require Administrator privileges.

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(In fact, you might even be able to directly use the volume ID in your backup scripts, without having to mount it anywhere. For example, \\?\Volume{1be3da43-6602-11e0-b9e6-f11e1c50f5b5}\projects instead of Q:\projects.)

Use DISKPART to set your disk offline
It will stay offline even after a restart or a new power on

Use DISKPART to set it back online

This can be done in scripts

command file to put disk 2 offline:

Offline.cmd

 echo list disk              > c:\windows\temp\namexxxx.none
 echo select disk 2         >> c:\windows\temp\namexxxx.none
 echo offline disk          >> c:\windows\temp\namexxxx.none
 echo exit                  >> c:\windows\temp\namexxxx.none
 diskpart /s c:\windows\temp\namexxxx.none
 erase c:\windows\temp\namexxxx.none
 pause

command file to put disk 2 online:

Online.cmd

 .
 echo select disk 2 ........
 echo online disk ......
 .

Execute as administrator

The correct answer is using the /P parameter to mountvol (see the comments in the accepted answer to understand why /D is not enough) but that only applies to recent windows versions (NT kernel version 6 and up).

The devcon utility as described in this answer works across all NT versions