E-sata drive not recognised.

[Sauniere]

I have a home built computer with a Gigabyte EP34-DS3R motherboard, running Windows Vista (did I hear the groans?) and have installed a second Western Digital 500mb SATA hard drive in an enclosure that allows connection by USB or E-SATA.

Connected by a USB cable the drive is recognised and works.

Connected via the E-SATA cable it is recognised in the BIOS as being a slave on the IDE 0 channel, with the C drive (which is an identical Western Digital drive) recognised as the master disc. I have followed WyomingKnott's guide and am at the dreaded step 10, because the E-Sata drive is not seen at all by disc management. I have installed all the drivers on the Gigabyte driver disk, and checked for updates, with no result. I have been into the BIOS and tried setting ACHI mode, but that just results in the computer being unable to boot.

What can I try next, or should I just resign myself to using the drive in USB2 mode only?

 

[WyomingKnott]

Can you try installing it internally? The purpose of that test would be to see if there is a problem with either the ESata enclosure or your ESata port.

 

[Sauniere]

I will try that later, at the moment I am waiting for Windows to format another external drive so that I can put my backups onto it. I am however pretty sure that it will work internally.

To back up a bit it used to be the D drive of a RAID 1 setup, but the computer suffered a failure due to a RAM chip malfunction. I did not know that it was faulty RAM that was causing the problem and decided to reinstall Windows, but after the first failed attempt I ran RamTest and discovered the problem. After removing the faulty module I reinstalled Windows with the D drive still in place and stupidly allowed the Vista installation to format it.

I recovered the data that was not on other back up media with the drive installed temporarily in my wife's computer, and now want to use it in an enclosure, as a back up drive, preferably running at E-Sata speed. Once I had removed it from my computer I discovered the most crazy thing that the Vista installation did. The boot manager files were put onto the D drive whilst Vista installed itself on C. Without the D drive Vista would not boot, so I had to do a second clean install.

 

[Sauniere]

Problem Solved. It turned out that the hard drive enclosure only worked in SATA 1 mode, not SATA 2. As a result the Western Digital hard drive needed jumpers fitted. I found a jumper on an old CD ROM dive and fitted it, and its now working.

The Enclosure is this Apex model https://www.amazon.co.uk/3-5-USB-Combo-External-Enclosure/dp/B001T6ZUW2/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1296496932&sr=8-3 and the suppliers do not point out that it only works in SATA 1 mode, nor do its laughable instructions, which consist of a single jpeg image on a small CD.

After discovering from an Amazon review that it was only SATA 1 the solution was on the Western Digital website here for anyone else with the same problem. http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1337