Windows 7 - Backup drive issue

Hello, so I have a WD 1tb internal drive docked externally via Thermaltake blacX dock through esata. If I leave it powered off and boot into windows and then later decide I want to access the drive I power on and access it, however if I try to copy anything to the drive I get an error about the drive being write protected. Now if I have the dock powered on prior to booting into windows the write protection error isn't there. I can copy to it freely. Can someone explain why this happens?

Are your sata controllers set to AHCI or IDE in bios? It should not do that in AHCI mode. But, if it's in IDE mode, do not change it. Just report back and we can tell you how. If you change it now, you will not boot into windows.

According to an ASUS message board my motherboard doesn't support AHCI in any form. The JMicron controller only has enable/disable for esata. After scouring the BIOS menus I can definitely say it doesn't have this option as well.

Have a look here; write protected external sata drive

Thanks Pooch, but I think you misunderstood. I am able to read and write to the drive no problem if I have the external drive powered on when I boot. It only gets this write protection if I decide to power on after I already booted into windows.

I understand that you cannot write to the drive when it is started after windows, so there must be a reason for this, It would appear at first glance that the permissions are different in each case, but from research that I have done on the net changing permissions in a case like this may work but only until the PC is cold started. So I then started to look for other answers, did you even try this when it is in write protect mode?
1. Go to the disk properties page.
2. Select the 'Hardware' tab.
3. In the 'All disk drives' list, select the name of the external device.
4. Click the 'Properties' button.
5. Select the 'Policies' tab.
6. Under 'Write caching and Safe Removal', select 'Optimize for performance'.

On the other hand if you are not looking for a fix but just want info as to why it acts like it does I do not know

Yeah, since it works fine if it's powered on prior to boot it's not a big issue I was just wondering why it was doing what I expained. I'll check out the option you mentioned. Thanks for the advice though.

Essenbe thinks it is an AHCI issue, he may well be right but I find it hard to accept that eSATA is built into your MB when you cannot switch the external drive on and off when you want, which to me is the whole point of an external drive. sorry I cannot offer you more help

Yeah it is odd.