External hard drives don't boot with system
 

I have three Maxtors, two 250s and a 300GB in external enclosures; connected to the PC by USB. Since I have a lowly eMachines, I can't fit more than two hard drives in my machine's case.

The problem is, these hard drives aren't automatically recognized when I restart Windows. For example, if all of them are switched to on, and I reboot, none to all of them will be recognized by Windows after the reboot. If they are not, I have to flick them off and turn them back on - at which point they are promptly recognized.

The problem with this is shares. Since I share files on these external hard drives with the rest of the home network, it's imperative that these shares are active for as long as my computer is on. However, one of the problems is that any share on the drive is automatically disabled each time I have to manually get Windows to recognize the drive. This is quite an inconvenience, as I have to set up all my shares manually every few reboots.

Would this be the fault of my enclosures or Windows itself? Anything I can do to stop it (besides buying new enclosures)?

I believe it has to do with your motherboard and specifically the USB Hub. I have a friend who, when he boots his computer, the mouse randomly will or will not be recognized by Windows. It's survived plenty of reformats and even gone across 3 different mice (none generic - Microsoft Intellimouse Exporer, Logitech MX1000, Razer Copperhead), so we've pretty well narrowed the problem down to a flaky motherboard, since he's had other issues as well (for instance, his AGP slot seems to have a short as it's fried no less than 5 Video Cards over 2 years). EMachines aren't exactly known for top-quality components. A seperate USB Controller card MAY fix the problem, but I don't have much experience with teh things so I'm not sure.

Oh snap. That sucks for me.

But I thought eMachines is just a division of Gateway and they're not as crappy as they used to be?

If they were bought by Gateway, I'd have to believe that that was the case, but I must have missed that press release.

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/20...0202023702.htm

Guess you're right. Who knows. My money's still on the USB Hub, however.

The thing is that they also didn't boot with consistency on other machines (although admittedly, all of them were Gateways or eMachines model).

That, I can't explain. My external HD (Vantec Enclosure) and Flash Key are automatically mounted on every boot into both Windows and Linux.