eSATA HDD not seen in explorer

I just assumed it, not that it would any difference in your case? If you just wanted to occasionally use the drive for smaller tasks then I would just use usb, it's probably 30-40% as fast anyway. Basically what you have now is a sata drive connected to pata power running off a controller just like an internal drive. I wouldn't be connecting or disconnecting any internal drive in my computer during a power cycle. Your card has a boot bios that like a motherboard has to post and detect the drives attached. And then hand that off to the OS.

I found the software patch for sata 2 drives on a sata1 controller, but you have a sata 2 controller

Internal Connectors 2 SATA 3Gb/s Ports plus 1 Ultra ATA/133 channel

last loose end

Update, for the record: In services I had disabled SSDP Discovery Service and Universal Plug and Play Device Host. Hoping enabling them might make my computer (windows explorer) see the esata when turned on after Win XP is already running, I set them to manual. It did NOT have that result, BUT it did solve the "safely remove" issue. Now when clicking the safely remove utility icon, it does work to "stop" the drive.

So, it should be safe to power it down then, but I still have no solution for making explorer "see" the esata when it's powered up after windows has already booted.

Jean

Note: everything I read regarding hot swapping/safely remove refers to "removing" or unplugging the drive, not to just turning it off. Is safely removing really even necessary when the drive is just turned off with the power switch? Reinforcing the impression that it only relates to unplugging, after doing safely remove, properties of the esata in device mgr say:

Windows cannot use this hardware device because it has been prepared for "safe removal", but it has not been removed from the computer. (Code 47). To fix this problem, unplug this device from your computer and then plug it in again.

Seems like a valid question to me, even though it sounds illogical.

Hi JeanW I was having just the same problem with u. I'm using an external SATA II HDD enclosure connected on esata port on my PC. I wasn't able to hot plug the external drive, unless i went to the device manager and search for new hardware or if I turned it on before i boot my PC. Just a while ago I have found the solution for this problem, and it was mainly an issue with vista itself after installing SP1 (previously to installing SP1, i haven't had this issue, so i was positive that the problem wasn't with my HDD enclosure) so i searched at microsoft website (the search key was esata then..) and found this hotfix (KB950186) for the problem, downloaded it, installed it and…it works just fine as it was previously… Don't know about XP but the issue was fixed on vista..hope u'll find a patch or something on XP..