Auto-detect SATA drive

[canterbizzle]

I am having a problem with my external hard drive. I am using this enclosure. With it shipped a piece for my desktop which is basically an e-sata female to sata male cord attached to a bracket (i plug my e-sata cable into that which plugs straight into one of my sata ports). The problem is; when I turn on the external HD after windows has booted, the drive is not automatically detected. I have to go into device manager and scan for hardware changes under disk drives; it then works no problem. Is there anyway to make windows automatically detect the drive once it is turned on?

OS: Windows XP Pro 64
Mobo: Asus P6T

 

[Saga Lout]

It might work better if the drive had a permanent and dedicated drive letter. It could also be worth checking to see if that attachment has power saving settings that affect it. Finally, check in BIOS to see if SATA is enabled at startup - I take it from your phraseology that the drive is recognised properly if plugged in before you fire up Windows.

 

[canterbizzle]

It used to be internal, I assigned it a permanent drive letter (X) then, which still applies to it now. The enclosure does turn the drive off if it detects that the PC has turned off or gone into standby mode. My internal drive(with the OS installed) is SATA and the bios recognizes the drive. The bios also recognizes the drive if I turn it on after already being in the bios. And yes, if I turn the external drive on before I boot the PC, the drive is recognized.