drive using esata and usb

on my acer laptop ive got an esata external drive working through an express card (dual esata II controller) to the esata connection (on the caddy which also has a usb2 connection). to get the drive working i had to use the sataraid5 software and create a raid group(contiguous type). then i initialised the disk in disk management (in xp). this is the way i want it to work.

the problem is to transfer files from another pc to this external drive. so i connected via usb on the caddy and the drive was recognised but had errors in disk management (i think it said foreign disk, but it still worked). i copied some files over and took it back to the laptop.

i tried connecting via the esata/express card again but the drive cannot be seen. i have had to recreate a raid group with sataraid5 but all my files are lost as i had to re initialise the disk.

is there anything i can do so i can use both esata and usb with this drive (at different times obviously).

 

I don't know the specifics of your implementation here, but I think the problem is that you are trying to configure the device with the SATA/RAID program. You should just plug it into the eSATA adapter or a USB port and format it with Windows; that should probably let it work with the other connector as well.