External drives and Vista X64

I've lived through a nightmarish 48 hrs dealing with external HDDs... so maybe this post will spare others some agony.

Vista (at least Vista X64) does a TERRIBLE job with eSATA and drive letters. If you're getting "can't find device driver", "try this hotfix"/that then "doesn't apply to your system", can't see a USB or eSATA drive, and ESPECIALLY if you're running RAID.... adding an eSATA drive can destroy partitions of internal drives and simultaneously generate the preceding misleading error messages. Before adding an eSATA drive, make sure the drive letter after your boot drive and DVD drive is open, because Vista will double-assign the drive letter with disastrous results, as in corrupt the partition table of your internal HDD that is double-assigned.

Solution: give your internal drives (other than boot drive) higher drive letters. When you add the eSATA drive, give it a new drive letter. Try to keep the E: drive letter open (assuming you have a DVD drive as D.

If you don't need your internal SATA drives when working with eSATA drives, disable those SATA ports in BIOS (usually in something like "integrated peripherals) so that Vista never sees those internal drives. For instance, if you're going to boot XP from an eSATA drive, disable the SATA ports for your internal boot drive (or drives if your boot drive is RAID) BEFORE BEFORE BEFORE you plug in the external boot drive. If you don't disable the internal boot drive SATA port(s), XP will boot fine... .and corrupt the MBR on your internal boot drive, as in, finito--hope you have a system image of your VISTA boot drive cause it's toast if you left its SATA port(s) enabled.

DO A FULL BACKUP, SYSTEM IMAGE AND DOCUMENT FILES, BEFORE YOU PLUG AN ESATA DRIVE INTO A VISTA SYSTEM (other than a notebook that comes with a native eSATA port).

XP does a great job in handling "non-removable eSATA" (spin up the eSATA, then boot, and DO NOT disconnect the eSATA drive until after you shut down). VISTA on a mobo with only SATA ports does a TERRIBLE job with "aftermarket" external eSATA ensclosures. Watch your drive letters, guys.