Asus P5K/Jmicron E-Sata issues

[synaesthesia]

Bit of an odd one that I'll run past you folks in the hope someones come across this issue:

Have an Asus P5K-E WiFi motherboard with a jMicron E-Sata controller. I've run out of internal sata ports, and thus permanently use one of the esata ports for another hard drive sitting internally (cable looped back inside the machine).
However the other one is used for my many drive enclosures. However these only work if they are in the PC at the time it's turned on. No hotswapping, no ability to plug a drive in when the OS is already running (which is Vista x64 btw. Same happens in w7).

I've tried changing the drivers for the controller between 3 available from jMicron and the one Asus supply with no joy between any of them.

Anyone know a way to work around this?

[Hottentot]

Is it configured as AHCI in the BIOS or as an IDE. Only AHCI lets you do hotswapping.
You can also look in the device manager under IDE ATA controllers to see if the SATA controllers are installed or the default PCI IDE controller.

[synaesthesia]

Yup it's AHCI. Just updated the bios too with no avail :/