bootcamp windows 7 startup kills formatting of ext esata drive

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Level 1

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bootcamp windows 7 startup kills formatting of ext esata drive

I have Lion and Bootcamp installed on my MacPro 8-core (2007 version). I have an external SansDigital esata 5 bay tower connected via a HighPoint Rocket PCI portmultiplier card. The tower contains JBOD disk for Mac OS X backups includind a 2TB drive for TimeMachine.

A crazy thing happens when I boot to Windows7 using Bootcamp. After my Windows session, when I reboot my Mac to Lion, the Mac formatted drive in the 1st bay of my esata tower becomes unreadable. I get an error message when booting that the drive is unrecongnizable and do I want to format, ignore or eject. It happens 100% of the time.

Now I have to remember to have the esata tower turned off before using Bootcamp to keep the 1st bay drive from being killed. I used the same hardware with SnowLeopard and Bootcamp with no issues for a few years. My Lion upgrade was a clean install.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

Bud James

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.7)

Posted on Dec 31, 2011 9:23 AM

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Answer 1

HaraldS

Level 2

348 points

Dec 31, 2011 12:09 PM in response to budjames1

It might be that the fact Windows under BootCamp does not run in AHCI mode. It could be, the drive is not switching modes properly.

There is software on the net (AHCI Enabler) that patches the MBR for AHCI mode. The help file indicates, how to adjust the registry PRIOR to this operation. It also allows backup of the MBR, and restoration.

Chad Johnson is the principal author.

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