Posted: 8/25/2011 7:47:44 AM EDT
I have a Samsung Series 3 notebook (NP300-V5A-A02US) that I modified slightly, by removing the optical drive & replacing it with an internal SATA-to-eSATA cable, like this one:
The right side fits the data side of the notebook's internal slimline SATA port. Thing is, I can't get any eSATA devices to appear on the system. Power cycle, reboot, "Scan for New Hardware" in Windows 7's Device Manager; the external drive never shows up. HotSWAP! is likewise unable to detect the drive. Running on AC or battery makes no difference. Have checked and re-checked the adapter cable. It's securely plugged in on both ends. I even swapped it out for a brand new one. Likewise for the eSATA cable going from the adapter socket (pictured above) to the external drive. I tried a couple of different external drives, still no success. If I reinstall the optical drive, it is recognized and works normally. So I'm reasonably sure the internal slimline SATA socket is OK. The weird thing is, I have had eSATA drives recognized previously - it just won't happen now. Neither BIOS nor Windows 7 can "see" anything connected to the eSATA adapter, although it worked when I first performed the modification, about a week ago. The same external drive works fine when connected via USB. However, that isn't a solution, because I want to use a fast eSATA connection, not a slow USB 2.0 connection. What could be the problem? Is it possible there is a grounding issue? |
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I had a problem with an ESata drive being seen but dropping off as soon as I tried to write to it.
Solution seemed to be going into BIOS and enabling hot swapping. Now, when I select the icon in the system tray to safely remove devices, all of my drive show and the ESata now works. It's an ASUS Mobo though and might not be your fix, just throwing it out there. |
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No such options in the BIOS unfortunately.
eSATA hotswap support is very flaky, when present at all. Whether it works seems to depend heavily on the chipset used in the external drive. I have one external HDD that I can hotplug/remove from my desktop, with the only problem being that Windows 7 gets retarded for several second while the drive spins up. I have another external drive that, when I hotplug it via eSATA, causes the system to reboot. At this point I'd settle for having to connect/disconnect the eSATA drive to the notebook while it's powered off. But I can't even get that far. The eSATA drive isn't recognized at all. It would make more sense if this never worked at all. Instead, it worked several times last week, but now it won't work at all. I didn't change anything seemingly important. update: Operator error, as usual. I was tinkering with the BIOS options last week and I toggled "UEFI support" to "Enabled" just for grins. Somehow, that made the system unable to recognize anything but the original optical disc drive on the secondary SATA port. Now that I've reset everything in BIOS to defaults, I can once again hotswap the drive with the eSATA adapter. Yes, it's true that internal SATA and eSATA technically have overlapping current ranges, not identical specs. However, it doesn't appear to matter, as long as you're attaching a proper eSATA disk enclosure, which I am. |