I bought an Acomdata E5 SATA External Hard Drive a while back (I think it was right after Christmas). It's a 250gig hard drive that I use for all my games and music: interesting side note, 250 gigs makes it about 5 times the combined disk space of my two other hard drives.

 

Anyway... about halfway through March I got and installed Linux. I now successfully dual-boot Linux and Windows, with Linux installed on my secondary 15gig hard drive. Ever since I installed Linux, however, my Acomdata drive hasn't been recognized.

 

Linux recognizes both my primary (windows C:/) drive and secondary (windows D:/ drive, Linux hda), as well as my floppy, CD-ROM, and DVD+/-RW drives, but not the external hard drive. Windows acknowledges, with some caressing, that the D:/ drive exists, but of course can't access it due to the different formatting systems, as well as the peripheral drives, but the external drive (it used to be the G:/ drive) is nonexistant in all ways. I tried reinstalling its driver, moving the SATA PCI card it plugs into, and doing a repair setup of Windows. Running a CHKDSK in XP's repair setup told me the drive appeared to be suffering an unrecoverable error. It said the same thing about both of my loaded disk drives (CD and DVD) and my unloaded floppy drive.

 

I've already tried futzing around the external case and installing it internally, but that has failed. I may have to get another PCI card for the thing, but I don't know. All I do know is that it has power but goes completely unrecognized.

 

Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Eh, nevermind this thread. I fixed it today--it was, indeed, the PCI card. I now bought a new card and have the hard drive mounted internally. Thankfully, I still have all my info.