eSATA hard drive does not apear.

[fishquail]

Here is a fishy one...

I have an external eSATA hard drive that will not show up in my computer. Sounds simple right?
The drive is formated with data on it. I have attached it to another computer via eSATA and it works A-OK, but on this other system it will not show up at all. -not in device manager nor in disk management. not visible to windows at on this machine at all...
SO...
I have gone into the BIOS and it shows up under Raid setup utility. When in windows i turn the drive on and it makes the "windows detection noise" But nothing happens after that.

Its got to be the BIOS but where? Is there somethign in the BIOS i am overlooking.

Motherobard is Tyan Thunder K8WE with onboard SATA.

 

[RichPLS]

If you have all your SATA controllers enabled in BIOS, and drive is showing up too, then you maybe the external controller does not have drivers installed for it...
My board has two different controller manufacturers, thus needs drivers loaded for each one.

 

[fishquail]

I found out that my problem was this:
My motherboard (Tyan Thunder K8WE) has a built in Nvidia raid controler with 4 channels. Previously I had all 4 channels as seperate drives. I had recently set up a RAID-0 array of 2 drives. On the channel 3 and 4 I had attached the eSATA hard drive as a single drive.
The problem is that the RAID controler is all or nothing. You must RAID every drive once you raid a pair or it will not work. So in order for my one eSATA drive to work I had to go into the RAID setup and add it as a new array and specify it as a "Spanning" array of JBOD. (just a bunch of disks)
Now it works and windows sees it.

However, I see now that it would be better if I am going to use eSATA drives for hot swapable that I get a new eSATA controler card for this purpose as the current one requires reseting the BIOS level RAID every time you want to add it again.

 

[Paperdoc]

This sounds exactly right. With a separate controller you could get your external drive out of the RAID system entirely, which is what you really want. Just be sure that you buy a controller card that specifically provides an eSATA port. They are slightly different from plain SATA, the most important point being eSATA almost always includes support for hot swapping, whereas plain SATA may or may not.