External SATA hard drive suddenly hangs Vista

[Greenlizard0]

Essentially I have an external hard drive that I put into a caddie myself. It's a SATA caddie, and I pass the cable through one of the case's rear watercooling holes into an internal port located near the "rear" of the motherboard. When I wanted to run a back up, I'd turn it on and within a few seconds recognition and usability would occur. No problems.

I've just replaced it with a higher capacity hard drive, and all of a sudden switching the caddie on causes Vista to hang. If I then switch it off I sometimes regain control of my PC, sometimes I don't. The only way I can overcome this is to power down the caddie, and press the reset switch to reboot into Windows.

I have swapped the newer hard drive for the older one, and the same thing occurs so I know it's definitely not the drives themselves. I have tested the drives on the other internal SATA ports and they're fine again.

Can anybody help please?

[nightkhaos]

Essentially I have an external hard drive that I put into a caddie myself. It's a SATA caddie, and I pass the cable through one of the case's rear watercooling holes into an internal port located near the "rear" of the motherboard. When I wanted to run a back up, I'd turn it on and within a few seconds recognition and usability would occur. No problems.

I've just replaced it with a higher capacity hard drive, and all of a sudden switching the caddie on causes Vista to hang. If I then switch it off I sometimes regain control of my PC, sometimes I don't. The only way I can overcome this is to power down the caddie, and press the reset switch to reboot into Windows.

I have swapped the newer hard drive for the older one, and the same thing occurs so I know it's definitely not the drives themselves. I have tested the drives on the other internal SATA ports and they're fine again.

Can anybody help please?

Am I to understand you a hotpluging your SATA drives into your motherboard?

[Greenlizard0]

Sort of yes, it's an external caddie with it's own power switch.

[nightkhaos]

Sort of yes, it's an external caddie with it's own power switch.

So the HDD is plugged into one of the SATA ports on the motherboard?

Some motherboards, not many mind you, don't like SATA drives to be hotplugged. However, ever since eSATA came out this problem has all but disappeared (any system that cannot accept eSATA connections being rejected by the masses for this very reason).

Does your HDD work fine if the system is powered down when you plug it in?

[Greenlizard0]

Yes it does.

I seemed to have cracked it by reinstalling the rear two SATA port hardware's drivers. Everything's fine and dandy again.

Oh and don't talk to me about eSATA :/ *shudders at the memories*