Hi,
I bought an internal wd 750gb sata hd. Since I wanted to be portable, I bought a elite kingwin hd enclosure (combo usb/esata interface). Then, I also bought an eSATA expresscard RAID from SIIG, inc. to use it with my laptop. At first everything looks fine. I installed the driver for the SIIG controller card. Then, I connected with my kingwin and was able to format the drive with no problem (I didn’t setup the hd as RAID, just a contiguos drive). The initial setup was not a problem. However, the problem encountered right after.
1. I tried to disconnect the SATA cable from my controller card by unplugging the cable (hot swap). I then tried to reconnect but the drive doesn’t seem to recognize.
2. I went into disk management and noticed that that drive became unallocated even though I did format it initially.
I thought I did something wrong and went ahead reformatting it again. This time I transferred data into the drive.
3. For some reasons, my laptop froze during the night and the next morning I know I had to reboot the laptop. After rebooting, my drive failed to be recognized in My Computer as well as in disk management (unallocated again).
4. I also noticed something about my controller card (SIIG expresscard). Everytime I tried to connect the drive to the controller card, I had to create a new RAID.
4. I then went and bought an internal SATA controller card -> hooked to my desktop and connected the drive (still unallocated).
5. I tried to scan for files by using my recovery files software and it seems that there are data on that drive.
I have some questions:
1. Why does the SIIG card requires me to recreate a new RAID each time? According to the manual, this card can support both RAID and NON-RAID.
2. Is there a safe way to remove the drive without making the drive goes from formatted to unallocated?
Thank you for your help.
Duc
