Problem with E Sata Ports

**Bhardwaj** · 30-03-2009

I recently bought a Asus P5K3 Deluxe motherboard and I tried installing two esata external hard disk drive but I am not able to get the motherboard to get display to show up. Anyone know what I am facing as a problem?

Please suggest me some views regarding this

**Russell** · 30-03-2009

A while ago I upgraded my boot drive to a 10K RPM Raptor drive. As I already had a 500GB secondary drive in the rig I was left with an extra 160GB SATA II disk burning a hole in my pocket. Being the geek that I am I picked up a Vantec NexStar3 eSATA & USB 2.0 drive enclosure so I could make use of the extra drive.

One of the nice features of that particular enclosure is the SATA to eSATA bracket that comes with it. The bracket allows you to convert an open internal SATA port into an eSATA port that you can use with the enclosure's eSATA interface. Sweet!

Anyhow, I put it all together and fired it up. The enclosure worked like a dream when hooked up via the USB interface, but the eSATA fell flat on it's face. Anytime I connected the enclosure via the eSATA interface and the bracket my box would hang during boot up - before the OS started loading. This told me it was a BIOS and/or firmware issue.

I tried all of the BIOS settings, SATA cable and port combinations, and even some Black VooDoo and still couldn't get my machine to boot when that enclosure was attached via eSATA.

**Hardwareman** · 30-03-2009

Well, I still don't have specifics. It's my understanding that there's a couple of options out there for SATA chip sets that support port multipliers, and some port multipliers aren't supported on some chipsets. However, this document says that port multipliers are supported, so some port multiplier has obviously been tested

the internal SATA drives (up to 4) are connected via an SiS 1182 controller. The eSATA drive connects via the Marvell 88SE6111-NAA1 controller which I've read DOES support port multipliers.

As soon as the holidays are behind me, I'm going to access if there is anything left over from the Xmas budget. If so, I'm looking at an external SATA enclosure with a build in port multiplier. Possibly this one. If so, I'll be sure to post my findings.

**Maxforu** · 30-03-2009

I downloaded the two different JMicron drivers from Asus website, when you right-click on the unknown device and search the two RAID folders, it doesn't find any drivers. Also when you right-click and try to search for the driver via internet, it doesn't find anything either. If I installed the chipset drivers, wouldn't have be enough?

**Killen** · 30-03-2009

Have you tried the drive with eSata on another system? Is there any way to jumper the drive to the slower speed (is it SATA1? 150 or something...)? I've seen this fix work before, but it wasn't with pre-packages esata drives.

Also, I've seen problems on some systems with esata hot-swapping, although the same system might work if you boot with the drive attached. It's worth a shot.