External eSATA disk not recognized

I note in your mobo's manual that SATA Ports 3 & 4 are enabled or disabled together, separate from Ports 1 & 2. Then after they are enabled, you have separate entries in the BIOS on whether or not to use that port as part of a RAID array. So, did you Enable SATA Ports 3 & 4? And did you make sure they are NOT set to be part of a RAID system?

After that, does your mobo require that SATA drivers be installed in the OS to use them? The manual, Section 3.2.2, covers running the Driver Install software from the mobo CD, but does not mention specifically drivers for SATA. I'm wondering if you had a driver installed for the first SATA Port pair (1 & 2), but another driver might need to be installed for the second pair (3 & 4) now that it is enabled for use. Maybe that's why Windows can't deal with the new drive.

Thank you guys for your comments.
This drive is definitely hot swappable, yet I tried to power on before boot but no luck.
Yes, Sata 3-4 is enabled and not part of a Raid array.
May I insist that the drive works with the sata connection as long as Windows does not interfere. Acronis Disk Director let me create and format partitions, then with Acronis True Image I created backups of other drives, all of which are then usable when I go back to my USB connection.
I also run SpinRite with the eSATA connection with no problems.
The driver question is interesting.
The drivers listed for my other SATA drives are exactly the same as the ones listed for this drive. All Microsoft.
Tried to install the corresponding NVIDIA ones but was not succesful.
Tried to uninstall the drive and then select driver, cannot do that either.

Several motherboards needed a bios update for 1TB hard disks.
You might want to update the bios.

did you manage to fix it?
I have the same problem..
Thanks in advance

No.
My MB is the ASUS P5E3 and reading the manual, under the external SATA port says : "When using hot-plug and NCQ, set the Marvell eSATA/PATA Controller Mode in the BIOS to [AHCI]..."
Thwn refers to a chapter in the manual for details but there you do not see any of the AHCI thing. Anyway, I tried to set the SATA configuration to AHCI but the system cannot boot, I do not know why.
When I connect the disk with the eSATA cable, I sense that something is happenning because the system(mouse) freezes for few seconds but then I do not see any disk not even in the device manager. I never managed to see the disk in the device manager.

Well, I finally gave up and purchased a cheap (U$ 24) PCI-Express/eSata card.
It came with its driver (very important) and that was it.
Problem finally closed!

<a href="http://s185.photobucket.com/albums/x301/trick97/?action=view&current=eSATAafter.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i185.photobucket.com/albums/x301/trick97/eSATAafter.jpg" border="0" alt="eSATA after trim"></a>

It was the opposite problem for me. Acronis will not recognize the drive when connected via esata but fine when USB2. Windows vista and xp no problem either way. Acronis had weird problems not matter how it was run, either from cd or windows. My guess is that acronis does not like saving data via different connections (usb, esata) on the same archive. I even get a "failure to connect to esata 5" error when connecting via esata and running via acronis disk image cd. Acronis support has been useless and there software is generally terrible. I ran the restore option in their software and if I enabled "verify" it said it would take 1day and 12 hours but when I ran it without verify it ran in 30 minutes though not without failure.

Found a post somewhere that described a paticular sentence in the wording of the way acronis does the steps. Just had to answer one of the questions differently. Can't remember exactly what the wording was but there was a 2 or three options and I was choosing the wrong one. Something like its it an old archive?