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.