[donone]

I have Acer Aspire x1700 desktop with Vista Home premium 64.
It has an eSata socket which has been enabled in the bios.
On connecting a WD Book Studio which has USB, Firewire and eSata connectors, the system goes into a time warp looking for the drive, which works using the other connectors. Sometimes the system hangs on/off regularly during this process.
If the drive is pre-plugged in then sometimes the system won't start.

Meanwhile the drive light is flashing constantly.
Any experience of this problem would assist me.
Thanks

 

[Tyree]

Will the external drive work properly connected to USB or Firewire?
The circuitry of prebuilt external drives is not very reliable.

 

[donone]

Hello Tyree, yes the drive works on usb and firewire. I have done a lot of work on this and determined that the Book drive is not hot swappable but...

..Start drive, wait for lights to stop flashing. Plug into system and power up system. System hangs after windows progress bar. Unplug eSata cable, windows continues, but no drive installed.

..As above but don't plug into system until the round windows logo appears. Windows loads OK, the drive is recognised in 'Computer' and 'Management' and is accessible sometimes (maybe timing of plug in). All OK.

..As above but sometimes opening 'computer' hangs. Unplug drive cable and a message that the drive needs formatting.

Whenever the computer hangs it is usually releasable by unplugging the eSata cable. Plugging back in sometimes works?

Conclusions...
..the drive goes busy and windows is waiting for something, removing the cable provides that by removing a busy signal?? Odd that windows is released rather than crashing, which indicates that windows requires some feedback.

..the format on the drive is somehow supposed to be different. I notice that using windows format leaves an empty drive, using Acronis format gave two system folders (or left them but did a 'quick' format).

Final conclusion, it is not the eSata on the Acer. It is not the cable or sockets. It could be the WD Book drive remaining busy. It could be something in Vista 64 but not likely, others had the problem with XP.

Drivers. I got the latest drivers for NVidia GeForce 7100/nForce 630i v15.26 16 March 2009 for Vista 64. Installed, all appeared to be OK but the drivers shown in windows are still the microsoft ones 2008. Anybody can help with that?