External hard drive not detected---again

ronstitt · 14 Apr 2011

I have an 1T external drive plugged into esata port. It used to work and now it doesn't? When I boot up bios correctly identifies the drive as a seagate sata drive. When I look at device manager is says its a seagate SCSI drive and therefore the system doesn't recognize it at all? In device manager under drive properties it say " this device is working properly" I checked in disk management and the drive is there and on line but because it sees it as a SCSI drive and not sata its not found by any software??? I think its something to do with the Windows sp1 update as it was working fine. I also changed external drives....no difference......Heeeeeeelp!

Teekz · 14 Apr 2011

Hi ronstitt.

You said that the hard drive shows up in Disk Management as online, but is the partition on the hard drive assigned a drive letter? That's caught me out in the past.

Try locating the hard drive in Disk Management again, right click the partition, and press "Change Drive Letter and Paths...". In the window that appears, check that there is a letter in the box. If not, press "Add...", and choose one.

Let me know how it goes. :)
Tom.

ronstitt · 14 Apr 2011

I checked again...I was incorrect on what I said about it showing up in disk management. It shows as "disk 2 removable" and assigned a drive letter of G: The external drive used to be "F" I believe disk "G" is just a usb port. So the external drive is not showing up in disk management but still shows up in device manager as a SCSI drive? not SATA like it did before?

Sardonicus · 14 Apr 2011

From the device manager, uninstall the device and turn off the PC.
With the device still plugged in and on, turn on the PC.
Windows may try to install the SATA driver.

ronstitt · 15 Apr 2011

Thanks... I have tried uninstalling both the disk drive and the controller in device manager several times It still reinstalls as a SCSI drive?

Shootist · 15 Apr 2011

Have you updated the drivers for the external SATA port and controller. More then like a JMicro chipset. At the best they are buggy.

ronstitt · 15 Apr 2011

Yep I have reloaded the old drivers drivers tried it and then the latest, no change. The controller on the motherboard is the Marvell 88SE6111 chipset.

Swifty · 15 Apr 2011

Hey there ronstitt,

Have you happened to be messing around with the registry at all? Allowing things to be changed in the registry because I know at one point I did not mean for it to happen but my registry became buggy because I un-installed windows media player and I asked for help on the site ;P and I followed the directions wrong and buggered something up, and my cd drive would not work, I had tried everything and the only solution to fix this problem was to reinstall my entire operating system and this worked.

ronstitt · 15 Apr 2011

Hi Swifty.....No, messing with the registry is a little out of my expertize

Sardonicus · 15 Apr 2011

Trying reinstalling your chipset drivers and restart.