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I have a Western Digital eSATA external HDD and have been trying to get it to work with a Medion laptop running Vista Home Premium. No luck whatsoever. Is it likely to be a Windows driver issue, or just an incompatibility with the laptop?

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This is definitely the kind of question that belongs over on superuser.com - especially now that it's out of beta. – Mark Henderson Aug 20 '09 at 1:43
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migrated from serverfault.com Aug 20 '09 at 6:16

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4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

eSATA works on Vista for the most part. The problem comes when you want to remove the device; the nForce Vista x86 driver (circa 2007) would bluescreen when you removed the drive. Not sure if this is still the case now. Microsoft SATA drivers support removal with a registry fix, KB950186 and also KB961078.

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up vote 2 down vote

I'm not aware of any reason why an eSATA drive wouldn't work with Vista.

You'd need to post some more details about the problem to get a more meaningful answer, though.

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up vote 0 down vote

Have you checked to see if the drive is showing up in the drive manager in administrator tools. It may simply be it's not formatted.

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It doesn't show up in drive manager. I know it is formatted because I can access it from another PC via USB. Interestingly I can't reliably access it via USB on the laptop either. – Anthony K Aug 20 '09 at 8:11
It might be worth having a look in device manager to check that there are no unknown devices. I'm just wondering if the esata port is on a different controller that hasn't got drivers. – Col Aug 20 '09 at 9:39
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up vote 0 down vote

If the drive still fails to show up try this. Connect and disconnect it whilst Device Manager is open. See if there is any activity under hard disks or controllers.

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