ESata making me grumpy

lostbear

lostbear

lostbear

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21 Sep 2007
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yuletide greatings.

Ive got an Asus Striker Extreme (its a nvidia 680i) which sports 2 x eSata ports (I shape connectors). Ive just shelled out for a 500gb WD My Book with esata / usb 2 connectivity. It works fine in USB2 mode but i chose it to use the eSata ports. Try as I might but i cant get the damn thing to pick up the drive.

Ive scoured the net but failed to find anything useful. Anyone had any troubles with esata on 680i? Dont think board or model makes a difference im guessing all 680i mobos use the sama sata chip. Ive poked about the bios and turned on anything to do with sata and all the drivers are in and are current.

if anywone can help me id be most grateful.

Cheers.
 
theres nothing called jmicron on the mobo driver disk. when u shove it in picks up what os your running and displays the relevant drivers.

I should have mentioned i guess, that im running a quad boot (winxp 64bit, Vista ulitmate 64bit, Ubuntu 64, and macos tiger)

Im only intrested in getting this going in xp64bit. Im a 3d artitst and this the os i work on. Usb functionality is fine in the other oses.

as fas i can tell its got something to do with the silicon image chip on the mobo and the drivers are installed fine.

im at a loss.
 
and got it turned on in the bios?

It's the kind of thing I'd turn off thinking I'd never use and then completely forget to turn it on when I needed it. (I did this with onboard audio before, but had to use it in linux and couldn't figure out why on earth it wasn't detecting it).
 
yeah its enabled. its in the BIOS as a Silicon image SATA II controller and i have it set to SATA mode rather than RAID mode. It allows for using a bunch of external disks in RAID mode but i just need it set to SATA to see the external hard disk on the eSata port i think.

Ive looked in the mobo manual which is next to useless.
 
Could be the same problem I had, I have an A8N32SLI and a Mybook with esata and went through the same problems exactly :)

Mine was all down to the eSata cable, the Mybook has a deep socket and the eSata cable I had would not go in far enough to make a connection.

I trimmed both ends back just to make sure the MB end would also be OK and now it works perfectly.

Found this pic on the TIVO forum that shows what to do with the shorter "tongued" cables.

esata.jpg


Hope this helps.
 
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hmm intresting. im not into cable mutilation, not with my club fisted clumsy hands. i figured it was something to do with the cable but rather its lenth. its new 1.8 meter cable and ive read some deveices have trouble transmitting the data over cables longer than 1 meter.

cheers, that was helpful. i had noticed that the cable didnt seem to sit right on the My Book end, i guess this is why now.
 
Just a stanley knife.

The metal covers on the flat sides goes under the plastic so it should be easy to do as I carefully cut through until I hit the metal. I just cut the two edges first and then did the two flat sides and trimmed off about 2mm. It was not very hard to do.

There are some cables available that are the right length of plug so you don't have to mod them but I'm not sure how you tell with out a good photo of the plug itself.
 
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Had to do that to get my WD My Book to work.

Your only removing 1-3mm of plastic.


From my previous post.


" Yip, it wont connect at WD end, you need do this.


sata2aeg7.jpg



You need cut plastic (round all 4 sides) bellow this RED LINE, I would do it in 1mm stages till you get good Electrical Contact and its tight (so cut away enough not just enough to get Electrical Contact and it is slack and later your loosing contact as Cable or HDD is moved.

At a total guess, I removed about 3mm of plastic. "
 
cheers for that both of you. Helmutcheese - im having trouble of clocking my striker and corsair ram - could u slide over here and add any advice u can think of? cheers!

im off down the shed to find a stanly knife.
 
right ive trimmed the thing back and it still wont work. i only did the end that connects to the My Book. ill try trimming the other end now.
 
ie just noticed that the esata controller is picking up the 1 drive on boot but it reports it as being 0gb??!??

wtf? do you think i damaged the cable by trimming it?
 
cheers. its got nowt to do with the driver tho, the silicon image thing that comes up immediatly after the bios post screen lists 1 drive but says its 0gb in size. weird.
 
i have. in fact its partitoned into 3 chunks, and its half full of data already. all 3 are ntfs partitions. I was reading on the silicon image driver page that the sata controller has its own flashable bios, independent of the motherboard bios. Do you thinks its worth flashing it to see if it behaves itself after?
 
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