Windows 7 - hangs after POST

I have gone through a lot of googling before posting this one...
I have acer 8930G laptop, Intel ICH9M-E/M controller and Hitachi 2tb esata drive..
hdd is working fine but esata has problems (No h/w problem i have CHECKED)

Problem:
When my drive is connected and I do a bootup.. it hangs after POST and again on Windows 7 boot logo, when i remove the esata drive it boots normally... if i connect it after windows logon, it again hangs..


I played around a lot with various drivers (Standard AHCI from Microsoft, various versions of Intel ICH9M-E/M controller 8.6.0.1007 to 10.0.0.1008). The results are as follows :
Standard AHCI : doesnt detect the esata drive
8.6.0.1007 : detects the drive but it hangs as stated above
10.0.0.1008 : doesnt detect the drive and Intel Matrix rapid storage technologies crashes..

Some other things which I have tried are :

played with the power options a bit regarding hard disk sleep and all, still no luck

playing around with BIOS updated it.

P.S.: SATA mode is AHCI

Sometimes with luck using 8.6.0.1007:
Often the esata hdd is detected out of the box and runs quite flawlessly (awesome transfer speed ) but It doesn't do it every time..

So it is not h/d problem, neither BIOS ... still trying to figure out whats the problem

some help with my problem ??

Have you spoken to acer technical support about the problem?

The only time I have had a similar problem was when I had a defective hard drive. I might suggest you run a diagnostic program to make sure the HDD is not causing the problem.