I don't know how to fix the problem, but I don't think formatting the hard drive will resolve the problem. It sounds like most of these problems are with external drives, or, like in my case, drives on a secondary controller. It doesn't sound like any
of these problems are appearing on the main HD controller so it sounds like a hardware configuration problem on secondary or USB controllers that can't keep the hard drives online. The drives are apparently disappearing from the HD controller configuration.
I have reinstalled drivers for my secondary HD controller which has a Marvell chip on it, but I still can't get past the problem. The HD I'm trying to write a system Image to appears to still be going off-line and resulting in the 0x800701B1 error. Formatting
will probably not resolve anything.