Seagate SATA Hard Drive Nightmare! HELP!

Hi all-- Hopefully someone can help.

I have a Dell Inspiron 8600, 2ghz, 1 gb RAM. I recently bought a
Serial ATA PCMCIA card so i could hookup a Seagate Barracuda 160 GB
drive. It is an internal 3.5" drive that i am running externally- with
an enclosure.

I went through all the Disk Wizard setup with no problem - it said i
formatted the drive and everything should be peachy. But when i try to
access the drive through Windows XP, it says it is not formatted. I
have tried many times to format it through Disk Manager, but it is
extremely slow... (only 23% OVERNIGHT).

All drivers are current, and cannot be updated. I have also gone to
the dell.com site and updated my BIOS - but to no avail. The PCMCIA
card seems to work fine-- the drive is recognized but it is seen as
formatted.

Another thing-- when the SATA cables are hooked up and i restart, my
laptop stalls on the "Windows XP with scrolling status bar" and will
stay there forever, until i power down, and disconnect the cable.

I can't seem to crack this one. Any options?

<josephclange@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1154224257.849084.314660@p79g2000cwp.googlegr oups.com...
> Hi all-- Hopefully someone can help.
>
> I have a Dell Inspiron 8600, 2ghz, 1 gb RAM. I recently bought a
> Serial ATA PCMCIA card so i could hookup a Seagate Barracuda 160 GB
> drive. It is an internal 3.5" drive that i am running externally- with
> an enclosure.

Any reason that you can't connect the drive to USB or Firewire?

Your problem sounds like dodgy drivers, or flaky PCMCIA hardware. I have a
similar problem trying to get Wireless G cards in my laptop. They all crash,
fail, freeze the boot. But my wireless B card works with no problems.

> Another thing-- when the SATA cables are hooked up and i restart, my
> laptop stalls on the "Windows XP with scrolling status bar" and will
> stay there forever, until i power down, and disconnect the cable.

I had the same problem with my second SATA drive, and booting into safe
mode allowed the computer to see it as well as not loop at boot. Have
you tried booting into safe mode with the SATA cable hooked up?