eSATA PCI-Express card doesn't "see" WD 1TB External Drive

[tloffman]

A few weeks ago I purchased the Iogear eSATA PCI-Express card and 3ft eSATA cable to hook up to my new WD My Book 1TB external HDD. After running the Iogear setup the computer failed to "see" the WD Drive. After many hours of frustration, I removed the card, and hooked up the WD drive to my Firewire 400 cable (plugged into a PCI-Express card) and the computer was able to "see" the WD drive again and all worked fine. I returned the eSATA card. The card appeared to be of high quality, but the setup software was very frustrating.

Then, I purchased another eSATA card with a different driver set (JMicron). The card is generic, and looked much cheaper than the Iogear card, but the install was easy. However, same result as before - computer couldn't "see" the WD drive.

Using Device Manager I checked the driver status and it was OK. I unplugged and replugged everything several times, rebooted, powered down and up the WD drive, etc. but still, the drive was invisible to my system.

So, I removed the PCI-E card and hooked up the WD drive again to Firewire 400 and it was fine again.

So, my conclusion was that the eSATA PCI-E cards were OK, but there was some problem with the WD drive not working with the eSATA drivers and/or XP.

I am running a Dell Inspiron, XP - latest service pack. Any ideas would be appreciated before I return the second card and cable and give up on eSATA.

[Fabian]

is that your 1TB hdd contain well formatted partition , i thing it is the problem due to same if your hard disk is not in proper format then that could be the problem see here How to format 1TB drive

[tloffman]

The original format on the WD was Fat32, but I converted it to NTFS. Should I format it BACK to Fat32?

[tloffman]

Additional info:

I went to the WD web site and they have a list of eSATA controllers "that have been successfully tested to work with the eSATA compatible Western Digital hard drives".

The only PCI-E controllers are from Addonics.

I ordered the card from Amazon and will give it a try. I will report back here if it works, or not.