eSATA not hotpluggable with WinXP?

[PartingShot]

Hey all. I recently built a new PC system having the following specs:

CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 250
MB: Asus M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3
MEM: Crucial DDR3-10600 2x1GB
HDD: Seagate 500GB (OS/programs) + 2x Seagate 1TB (additional storage)
PSU: Cooler Master GX Series 750W ATX Power Supply
OS: Windows XP Professional 32-bit, SP3

I have installed the mobo's AHCI drivers for the SATA controllers, and all 3 SATA hard disks in the system are running under WinXP in AHCI mode.

I have an external HDD enclosure with an eSATA port. I connected this enclosure to the PC with the appropriate eSATA cable and fired it up. WinXP detected it and added it to the drive volume list in Windows Explorer.

However, I thought that there would be a "Quick Remove" icon in the system tray to facilitate the hotplugging of eSATA drives, like there is for USB flash drives, or HDD enclosures with SATA-to-USB. But the icon does not show up in the system tray when the eSATA drive is introduced.

I did some Google research, and it appears that the problem may be the AMD chipset on my mobo does not support hotplug, even on the available eSATA port. Anyone else have this issue with eSATA on AMD-based systems + WinXP?

*EDIT*
There is a possible solution:

*HotSwap!*

According to the information on the above link, the HotSwap! utility was written to automatically perform the following manual workaround for one vendor's (Silicon Image) lack of a proper driver that supports SATA hotplug in Win2K and WinXP:

**********************
SATA: Hot Plugging Drives Under Windows 2000/XP
This feature is not explicitly highlighted in our current drivers, but all SATA controllers from Silicon Image do support hot plug capability. To remove a drive from a powered up system, do the following:

Enter the Windows Device Manager (through Control Panel or right clicking on My Computer and going to Properties)
Go to Disk Drives and find the disk you want to remove
Right click on the desired disk drive and select Remove/Disable
After performing this operation, you can remove the hard drive without risk of losing any data that is currently stored in cache memory.
**********************

Has anyone here successfully used this software utility for hotplugging SATA (AHCI mode) in WinXP?
Thanks in advance for any responses.

[Bjs]

Not only do you have to install the AHCI drivers for the board but you also have to enter the bios and set the esata to AHCI mode ... though I prefer to set this prior to installing any operating system.

Once setup correctly windows will simply show "drive offline" when not connected.

Also go down this link to bills22 post made on Sun May 23, 2010 1:23 pm with the header "Re: eSATA is it plug and play?"

[redwudz]

If you didn't install AHCI when you installed the OS, you will likely have to do some registry mods also. If you turn on AHCI in BIOS and get a BSOD, that may be the problem.

[TimA-C]

Extract the AHCI drivers and re-install (do you have a floppy drive in your system?) or make a slipstreamed XP disk with the AHCI drivers and install from that - you may get away with doing a repair install with a slipstreamerd disk - otherwise you'll spend ages trying to get it to work and end up re-installing anyway! Good luck!

[PartingShot]

Hey everyone. Thanks for your help. Sorry if I wasn't clear, but I do have the system running SATA in AHCI mode, which was enabled in BIOS, and with the AHCI driver for my mobo installed in WinXP via slipstreaming. My SATA drives are running under the "AMD AHCI Compatible RAID Controller" in the WinXP Device Manager list.

I'm certain I'm set up correctly for SATA AHCI because I can plug my external SATA enclosure to the PC system in question, turn it on, and Windows adds the drive to the list of drives (assigns a drive letter) and I can browse the contents of the drive when Windows Explorer refreshes itself after introducing the eSATA drive.

I'm scratching my head, however, as to why I don't see the "Safely Remove" icon in the system tray (the little green icon, like when a USB memory stick is plugged into a USB port). I've read that this icon appears in WinXP for all hotpluggable drives, including eSATA ones. I also know I'm not the only one who experiences the lack of this icon on the system tray with eSATA on WinXP. Again, it may be because my mobo's AMD chipset does not have the proper driver support for SATA hotplug.

Is there something I may have missed in BIOS? I already have all SATA ports set to AHCI, but is there any BIOS sub-setting that enables/disables SATA hotplug or "quick removal" on a powered system that I should look for?

[redwudz]

Have you checked the drive 'Properties' of the drives to see if they are set up for quick removal? Been a while since I've used XP, but that may determine whether the drive is listed for 'Safely Remove'. I don't think there are any MB BIOS settings for that, unless it's in the AHCI BIOS settings that should show up on your screen for a few seconds at boot. I don't recall which key to get access to the AHCI BIOS, but 'CTRL- something. It goes by too fast on my AHCI W7 boot to read.

I should mention the hot plugging didn't work with some of my MBs, though they did boot up fine with AHCI. Other MBs listed all my SATA drives under the 'Safely Remove' icon, even my internal drives. And most times I had to reboot to have the PC recognize plugged in drives. But my new PC with W7 does fine with AHCI, hot plugging and all.

[PartingShot]

Have you checked the drive 'Properties' of the drives to see if they are set up for quick removal? Been a while since I've used XP, but that may determine whether the drive is listed for 'Safely Remove'.

In WinXP, the eSATA drive properties show that it is set to "optimize for performance", while "optimize for quick removal" is greyed out (not selectable).

I should mention the hot plugging didn't work with some of my MBs, though they did boot up fine with AHCI.

That is exactly the case with my current board with XP. Maybe I'll explore that "HotSwap!" utility a bit and see if it offers a viable solution for mobos that don't appear to have SATA/eSATA hotplug ability.