Enable esata on my mother board

[Tracer11lb]

hi im new to toms hardware so bare with me.. my system is as follows:

msi x58 platinum sli
i7 920 stock speed
kingston ddr3 6 gigs
500 gb
pny 9800gt 1gb ddr3
vista 32 bit

so my problem is that i have an external docking station for internal hardrives i use it using usb connection and it works the computer (vista 32 bit) reads the drives fine. but i tried switching to esata cable ( i have a card and on board esata port) but the pc does not even show anything. i read some of the forum and it says to change the bios setting. like turning the raid or achi on auto and i did that but when i rebooted windows did not even boot up. it was stuck on the microsoft logo. i also tried to hookup the external hardrive (with the esata cable) and turned on before i booted into the bios but the sata ports (i have 8 sata plus 1 esata) it was not reading the drive i hooked up but its reading the internal hdd thats hooked up in the first sata port inside the pc. i dont know what else to do please help thanks

 

[strangestranger]

Well, I can't be too much help however if you are using esata and it is not powered, you will need a power supply of some sort.

If you have that and it still isn't showing up after a reboot, go into the device manager and do a hardware scan.

For the most part with ACHI you will need to install the drivers when installing the operating system, however in vista there is a registry value that you can edit to enable it, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

Look there for how. You will need achi for hotplugging and a couple of other things.

 

[Tracer11lb]

Thanks for the reply. I'll try that tonight hopefully it will work