Laptop Won't Identify eSATA external hard drive

[spice90]

Hiya,

I have a 2tb external hard drive (western digital in a star tech enclosure). When I connect it to my laptops built in eSATA port (HP DV7 4050EA) via the eSATA cable, nothing happens. The hard drive does not even appear in computer management/disk management/device manager.
The power supply to the hard drive works fine.

It does however work using the USB connection on the enclosure to a standard USB port on the laptop, just at USB 2.0 speeds rather than eSATA.

Does anyone have any idea on how I can get the hard drive working on the eSATA port?

Thanks

 

[cyanna]

check that the drive, the enclosure and the eSATA port are all the same version (ex)
check BIOS settings and make sure the On Board device configuration is not set to RAID
connect and power up the enclosure before you boot the laptop

 

[tiredtechie]

some tricks

Here are a few tricks.

1: Try flipping the eSATA cable around. Recently i came across an external HD housing that had slightly different "I" shape plug ends and the cable only worked one way even if both ends are standard "I" type. I tried another eSATA cable i had and it worked both ways. A defective cable is very possible and the one i got with the enclosure was very cheap indeed.

2: Plug in the cable as normal and if you don't get a detection then goto control panel --> system --> device manager --> click on the "scan for hardware changes" icon just below the "HELP" menu. Normally this will pop up your eSATA right away as windows does not auto scan for eSATA unless there is already a new hardware install in progress.

3: Some eSATA ports are combo USB/eSATA and don't have the power on feature that the USB part has. When you try trick #2 above it turns on the eSATA port to see if anything is there.

Some computer BIOS have a USB sleep/charge option that will put the combo eSATA/USB to sleep mode if the USB charge when sleeping is off. However if you turn it on in the BIOS you may have problems using your eSATA in windows.