PC does not automatically detect e-Sata drive

[Guest]

Hello,

I have a Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R (Intel Bearlake chipset)motherboard as
the basis of a Vista Ultimate system. My problem is that when the
system is up and running and I connect an e-sata drive, the PC does not
automatically detect the drive as it would do for USB devices. I have
to access 'Device Manager' and scan for new devices to get the drive
recognised.

What do i have to do to have this PC automatically recognise e-sata drives?

BTW I have the latest drivers and Vista updates installed as well as the
latest bios from the motherboard maker.


Thanks,
Shane

 

[DanR]

I don't have a direct answer to your question except to say that I don't
have your problem because I am using a Silicon Image Sil 3132 SoftRaid 5
controller card. It plugs into a PCIe x1 slot. My eSATA drive plugs into it.
I mostly leave this drive turned off and only turn it on to do backups. When
I do turn it on Vista and XP recognize the drive in a few seconds. (dual
boot) During post and boot the card is seen by the computer and OS and it
seems as though both are looking for the drive (that's turned off) as it
takes an extra minute or so to boot. (with the drive off) I needed to use
the PCIe card because my computer had no extra SATA ports. I have 2 SATA
hard drives and 2 ports is all there are. (PATA for CD/DVD drives)
However... at work I installed eSATA adaptor cards on 4 computers. (XP) The
type that just extends the native SATA to the back of the computer. We use
an eSATA drive to move data back and forth. (sneakernet) Until I saw your
post we had been powering down these computers... plugging in the eSATA
drive and booting. Now I see we can scan for hardware changes in device
manager and in seconds the eSATA drive show up. I tried it and it works.
So this is a long winded thank you for the tip.

 

[x]

I am also experiencing this problem.

Any solutions as of yet??

 

[Paul Shapiro]

I set the e-sata port to AHCI mode in the bios. I also had to install the
appropriate raid drivers for the e-sata port controller. I'm guessing the
raid driver includes the AHCI driver, since I didn't find any other driver
for that controller.