Dell Latitude E5430 with PR03X Dock not recoginizing ext HD through eSATA port

Question

I have a Samsung HD103SIf TB drive that originally came in an ext usb caddy. I used it with an older Dell Laptop running Windows XP. It worked fine until one day it would not power on.

I pulled the drive from the caddy and tried it on a custom HTPC with SATA from the motherboard... the drive worked just fine.

Now I have a Dell Latitude E5430 (Windows 7) with PR03X Docking station and I cannot get it to recognize the HD.

I first tried an ESATA to SATA connector and a spare power supply and the drive would spin up but not was not recognized.
So I tried a ESATAP adapter cord to the HD to eliminate the PS....now it won't even spin up.

I have checked the BIOS and everything seems to be where it should be from quite a bit of online research. I am thinking that because it was formatted with XP, Win7 won't recognize.

Or does anyone know of ESATA problems with my particular system? Is there an easy/cheap way to test the ESATA port functionality?

Answer 1

I’m afraid that if the drive is no longer spinning up at all it's possible the drive itself may have failed. While troubleshooting, removing as many points of failure is the best bet to pin the problem down to a specific component.

If available I would suggest checking the drive directly connected to a system rather than through an adapter / carrier, or using the E5430s eSATA port rather than the dock, and running pre boot hardware diagnostics on the drive to see if an error is returned or if the drive is detected correctly.

I would also make sure the E5430 systems BIOS is up to date with the latest released on the support site: http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/product-support/product/latitude-e5430/drivers, and checking that the BIOS feature under; System Configuration >> Miscellaneous Devices >> Enable eSATA Ports, is enabled.