on my acer laptop ive got a 1tb esata external drive working through an express card (esata II controller) to the esata connection (on the drive enclosure/casing which also has a usb2 connection). to get the drive working i had to use the sataraid5 software and create a raid group. 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 (the drive enclosure has usb as well) and the drive was recognised but had errors in disk management. 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 it had to re initailise the disk.

is there anything i can do so i can use both esata and usb with this drive (in xp)?

a raid group on a single drive is senseless and apparently fouled up as well.

I have an external USB HD and it didn't required that setup and frankly don't understand why yours did. I would struggle with it to get simple USB access and
make sure it is formatted as NTFS.