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Hot-plug external drive = forcibly dismounts internal drive. Why??
Hello all, This is an ASUS P5P43TD-Pro socket 775 Q8400, latest BIOS release. Works normally in all known other aspects. Windows 7 Enterprise, x64. 16GB memory. BIOS settings all "auto", i.e. no OC or anything of the sort. On-board LAN, Serial, parallel, IEEE all disabled. NVidia 220 video card, also set for defaults. There are six internal SATA ports (native ICH10R), with five fixed internal drives connected. The sixth port goes to an external SATA tray intended for hot-plugging bare drives. The BIOS does not distinguish between fixed and removable drives as some newer BIOSs permit. All you get to set is IDE emulation or AHCI. The drives are all set for AHCI to enable hot-swapping. The SATA driver in Windows is the Intel RST recommended by ASUS for this board. I have not allowed it to update to more recent versions. All this stuff basically works, but there's one screwy problem I can't seem to resolve. Out of the four drives that typically get hot-plugged into the external bay, three of them work exactly as you'd expect them to. The OS detects them and mounts them with a drive letter (H:, which is the next in line). No problem. ONE of the four drives causes this weird problem where it actually causes a dismount of one of the fixed drives. Not only a dismount, but it disappears from the list of devices too. And to make it even stranger, the new drive mounts with the correct drive letter (H), even though it knocks off the drive designated E! Aaargh. But it gets even stranger -- I've deliberately set a number of applications to have open file handles on E:, both local and network. Like six open file handles. Even *those* are forcibly closed when this problematic drive is detected, even though, as I said, it eventually mounts to drive H. Good grief. And yet stranger, as soon as I go to Device Manager and force hardware redetection, the original Drive E is redetected and the handles are restored. Does anyone have an idea what could be going on here and how to cure it? I've considered a secure erase on the problem HDD, thinking that its serial number is at the root of this conflict. Anyone think that this might work? [For some reason, the paragraph breaks are deleted from this post. It WAS originally somewhat more readable with them, but after three attempts to insert breaks, it looks like that's not going to happen.]
Last edited by GeneralEclectic; 11 Jul 2013 at 14:40. Reason: Trying to get para breaks to work