External SATA Woes

Hello -

My PC (WinXP Professional SP2) has a Seagate eSata drive attached. I've had the drive for about 9 months I guess.

Recently I began experiencing power-related problems with my PC. All is well as long as I don't totally remove power from it (i.e. turn off the power strip). Once I do that, the green power supply led blinks when I try to power it back up. The only way I can get power back is to unplug the 20-pin connector from the power supply to the motherboard, then plug it back in.

The PC is 4 years old, so I figured the time may have come to replace it. I decided to take an inventory of my installed software. To do so I tried to use a Window Mgmt Instrumentation command (wmic product list status). Well, that command produced and error about an invalid class string. Unfortunately, ever since then I cannot access my external drive.

When I turn it on, the light comes on for a few seconds, but eventually does out. It comes back on every so often and chirps. If I restart the system in safe mode with the drive turned on, it hangs at "DontGo.sys".

Any ideas on what this might be? Seagate wasn't much help tonight.

Thanks.

DontGo.sys is the Promise SATA driver. Update it to the latest version for your storage card.