PCIE eSata Card not recognising hard disk

Ok, booting with external disk plugged in and switched on, and with both cards i get same result.

Windows loads fine, but when it gets to windows loading screen, it takes quite a long time, and the blue scrolling wait indicator really chugs along.  Windows eventually starts, but there's no external drives showing up.

The eSata cards still show up fine in device manager, just not more disks in disk management.

Each of these machines only have a single PCIE slot, so i can't try different slots,..  that's why i tried three different computers.

:-S

I have read about non-video cards having issues in 1st (only) PCI-E slot.
From what I gather, most bioses seem to "expect" a video bios to load at a certain address, which other types of cards don't use.

Aside from seeing if Dell has a bios setting you can play with, or changing the addy in the driver, you might want to just use a PCI adapter instead.

hmm,...  after getting my hands on a different external drive, i've made *some* progress.
After trying 3 different HDD's in 2 different caddies... i think the problem is related to the caddie i was using not liking SATA2 ??... it works fine when i have an older HDD in there that is jumper configured to run at 150Gb/s. The other 1T drives that are defaulted to 3Gb/s don't like it :-S
The other caddie (Nexstar3 which is quite old) seems to work regardless of which drive i put in there tho :-\
Both the PCIE -> eSata cards are SATAII and hot plug/swap compatible.
Maybe the new caddie runs with the new disks at 3G/s (SATAII) and the PCIE cards don't like that?
Didn't make any difference using the internal SATA connector on the card.

hmmmmmm... That's possible. SATA and SATAII don't always play nice like they are suppose to. Some devices play less nice than others.

>> new caddie runs with the new disks at 3G/s

Did you mean 1.5? If the cards, caddie, and drives are all "running" at SATAII, there shouldn't be a problem.
Maybe the caddie is fubared somehow?

I think the best and cheapest solution for external SATA drives is an interface card that allows for one or two of the internal SATA connectors to move to the Case backplane.
No fuss, no hassle, no additional hardware to enable and no additional drivers, if you have a free internal SATA port that is.
Finding the card was a bit of a problem but the card itself cost me about 30$ and my external SATA is running like a charm from the same controller as my internal drives do.

I ended up getting the most recent JMB36X drivers from JMB website.  Seems to be working for now.

I had limited success with other drivers, just had to find the right ones.