eSATA connection

[BabyBear]

Having recently purchased an external hard drive I bought an internal to external cable and bracket to get the best from the hard drives eSATA capability. Unfortunately having fitted the said cable to my Dell 9100, which is running XP Professional, service pack 2 the PC does not recognise the hard drive. The hard drive, which is an Iomega Professional 1TB works fine via the USB connection.

Can anyone offer any suggestions as to how to resolve?

Thanks

[milsabords]

Check your BIOS, there may be an option to enable eSATA.

[BabyBear]

milsabords, thanks for your help I shall check it out and will let you know.

[BabyBear]

Morning milsabords, I was hopefull that you had the answer, unfortunately when I checked the BIOS both spare ports are switched on. Of the 4 ports 2 are showing the details of 250GB drives which I guess will be the machine hard drive, the other 2 do not show any connected drive.

Thanks for the suggestion

[milsabords]

According to the Iomega support site, the disk needs a separate power connection via a supplied adapter. Also, eSATA is not plug & play: you have to connect/disconnect it while your PC is powered off.

[BabyBear]

Thanks again milsabords, the unit does indeed have a separate power supply and powers up OK. I am aware of the need to power it up before switching on the PC, unfortunately to no avail. It works fine with the USB connection, if somewhat slow and limiting in functionality.

I spent a while on a 'chat' with Iomega technical support and believe it or not their only suggestion was to try a different cable and and PC (no mention of powering up before switching PC on, or checking BIOS), when I said I had neither they offered to change the hard drive. I don't think this is the issue though as I had a friend load 100MB+ of video using his PC and cable as he has the same hard drive.