Problems with Esata on Via vt6421 PCI addon card

[ZitZ]

Hi, I guess this is the right way to go about getting online support.

I purchased a via vt6421 PCI addon card a little over 6 months ago to add sata support to my p4vpmx motherboard which originally did not have sata ports.

Recently I purchased a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 which I inserted into a Rosewill external hard drive enclosure. This Rosewill enclosure has an ESata port and it shipped with an ESata to Sata converter bracket. I put the bracket into my computer and connected to my VIA SATA PCI Card.

The problem is if I want to use the ESata connection on the Rosewill Enclosure, I have to make sure I have the External Hard Drive connected and powered on when I boot my computer. Even if I boot with the drive connected, the boot will be slow, and the kernel will spit errors at me. I copied the errors below. Also when I run hdparm tests, the drive is abnormally slow.

I should mention that my operating system of choice is Linux, but I swapped an old IDE hard drive with Windows on it into the same computer and the problems were exactly replecated.

This problem is repeatable on any kernel I use.

I also removed the Seagate Barracuda from the enclosure and connected it to my computer by connecting directly to the VIA PCI card, and the drive works perfectly, no errors, full speed.

So I tried to run some other tests to rule out other possiblities. I connected the spare IDE hard drive to the IDE port on the via vt6421 to see if it could reach its full speed and it did.

I haven't ruled out a bad cable, or a bad port on the enclosure or bracket, but I do not have any other esata equipment to swap out in order to run these tests.

So I'm just looking for any recommendations. Or does anyone know of any issues using esata drive with the via vt6421? I've seen other posts on the internet with the same exact problem, we can't all have bad cables can we?

Thanks to everyone who reads my outrageously long posts and tries to help. I appreciate it.