esata on MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum????

[kandor]

Hi,

I bought an external hd enclosure today. A vantec NST-360SU-BK. It comes with a mounting bracket that has an esata port on it. Internally the bracket plugs into an available sata port. Then an included esata cable plugs from the mount bracket to the external enclosure.

Problem is on my motherboard (k8n neo4) when I plug in the esata cable and turn it on - nothing happens. And if I try to boot my system with it plugged in and turned on my bios will hang at 'detecting ide drives'.

Is esata just not compatable with my motherboard? There is not a lot of info out there about this.

Thanks,

Kandor

[kandor]

More info......

After lots of research: I still cannot get these esata drives to be recognized when plugged into the nvidia sata ports.

If I switch the si3132 chip to sata mode, the drive will show up in the si3132 bios, but I cannot get the si3132 driver to load properly in winxp when it's in sata mode. I end up with a broken 'mass storage device' in my device manager.

I've read that the si3132 on the msi k8n motherboard will not install in sata mode. These messages are almost a year old. Has this problem never been fixed? I have the latest bios, maybe an older one would work?

hmmmm

[kandor]

More Research,

My vendor informed me that MSI said esata is not working on my motherboard using the nvidia sata ports and that supposedly a fix is coming in a bios update.

[dbwillis]

So basically all 4 sata ports have to be on the same chipset?

[kandor]

Not exactly:

The motherboard has 6 sata ports: 4 nvidia and 2 silicon image. The esata drive will not be recognized by the 4 nvidia ports. The silicon image ports do recognize it in bios but it's not possible to run the silicon image ports in sata mode and lode the driver in windows.

So neither controller works but for different reasons.

Kandor