BIOS reads drives Windows 7 does not

Jared Isham

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Jul 8, 2014
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I have a NewerTech MAXPower eSATA 6G Pro PCIe card installed in my machine and am connecting a Sans Digital TR8M hard drive enclosure to it.

First off. I know that the Enclosure requires a card that supports a port multiplier and I know that the card I have does not support port multipliers. (so that would be my guess at a solution to my problem). But I am still curious as to why I am seeing what I am seeing.

When I boot my system all 8 drives show up in the BIOS boot log as online or their status ok. The enclosure lights up for each of the drives and as soon as Windows 7 boots it drops down to just two lights and only reads 2 of the drives. (I believe the enclosure has two ports with 4 drives on each port -- hence the port multiplier as I understand it.)

Upon further investigation I do find what appears to be all the drives (or at least a controller for each drive) showing up in the device manager.
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Another thing I experienced is I had the drive set up in FreeNAS (abandoned that for now since my computer isn't fast enough) and I was able to see all the drives and even format them into a RAIDZ2.

Is it simply that there aren't Windows Drivers for the card that make it function in the manner I am attempting? Should I abandon trying to figure it out and just get a new card? Really curious as to what the answer might be.
 

Jared Isham

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Jul 8, 2014
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4,510


I only see the two drives in Disk Management. They are not partitioned as Windows volumes as I had them formated as ZFS volumes to build a RAIDZ2. The two drives that windows Disk Management does read are also in the ZFS format but they need to be formated to be able to be used.