eSATA drives no longer recognized

D

Ducman69

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I have Vista 64bit installed on the C-partition, which is a RAID 0 array of two 500GB drives. I have Windows 7 installed on a 750 GB drive. I have an additional 500GB drive installed as well. All SATA drives, along with two SATA optical drives.

Externally I have two eSATA Acommdata 1TB drives and two 750GB drives on this machine.

Motherboard is Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R w/ Intel CH9R RAID controller.

In both the BIOS and either OS, the external harddrives are not recognized. I'm stumped.
 
Well, if they are not showing up in the bios, don't even look at the OS. It sounds like the Esata controller is not turned on. Try setting the bios settings back to the compatible default settings.

Was this setup working before, and then it quit? Or has it never worked?

Don
 
It was working, but only with either two 750GB drives or one 1GB drive at a time.

Then I installed W7 on one of the 750GB internal drives and no external esata drives could be read. It reads my little USB 320GB harddrive. Will have to scrounge around for a larger USB cable to test one of the external big eSATA drives that way. :)

I thought that perhaps there was some kind of size limit for partitions active for windows or something, but in theory it should still let me see one 750GB drive if there were some kind of software limit.

I don't know if eSATA drives are supposed to show up in the BIOS or not, since they are external media. I did set the bios back to "load setup defaults" and retried. Same result. :confused:
 
An Esata port is almost identical to an internal sata port. The only upped the voltage on the signals a bit to accomodate longer cables and specd sturdier plugs to better withstand.... uh plugging.

How are you plugging in the Esata devices. The specs on Gigabyte's website do not mention esata support. Only that it has 8 internal sata ports that support hot swapping.

Don
 
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Two of the SATA ports come off the motherboard onto the included eSATA plate that attaches to the back of the desktop.

Two additional eSATA ports were added via a PCIe card.
 
Are the ones from the mobo specifically marked as Esata? From reading the specs on your board, it does not have real Esata ports. The longer sata cables may be the cause of your problems.

Remove the Esata card and see if you can get just the mobo ports to work. Use the shortest cables you can find. Try plugging directly into the mobo if you can and see if it really is just too long of cables.

Don
 
Gigabyte provides a PCI slot adapter card that allows you to use two of you sata ports and connect two eSata cables and power via the back of the computer.

These are just extensions of the two internal ports through the back of computer, with a power port.
 
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