Vista 64 and external Sata HDD

Hi, I hope someone can help me with a problem I seem not to be able to fix:
I got myself a Toshiba external HDD with 1.5TB and USB as well as esata conncetion. HDD was originally formated to FAT32 but I reformatted it to NTFS. While the USB connection works just fine, esata is not working. If esata is plugged prior to OS boot, the computer freezes. If plugged in afterwards, it shows for about 20 seconds in device manager/disk drives and then disappears. It never shows in file explorer or in computer management/disk management. Here is what I did so far:
- installed all updates
- flashed BIOS
- reinstalled/updated drivers for USB
- tested the HDD with Windows 7 (it works there)
- tested my USB/esata combination port (port works)
- tested another esata device (did not work)
- contacted Toshiba helpline (no help)
- contacted HP, my laptop manufacturer (no help either)
- recovered my system
- uninstalled and reinstalled the driver for the HDD during the 20 seconds the drives shows up in disk drives.
- tried to install a fix from MS (it is actually for SP1) that supposedly help with the problem but it wouldn't install ("fix does not apply")
- tried various utility software and the only one that came back making sense was driver doctor that pointed out that my esata driver was out of date (but couldn't find a newer version)

Based on what I read, I tried to get into the BIOS to enable/disable ports or make other changes to the settings but HPs Bios is not even showing these options.

Has anyone encountered the same problem and was able to fix it? And if so, how???

thanks

Could be a bad port. Maybe you can try installing drivers manually isntead of using the Plug'n'Play features?

Nope. It is not a bad port otherwise it wouldn't work in Windows 7 on the same machine. But, I finally found the solution to the problem. Installed Intel Matrix Storage Controller and that did it.