e-SATA HDD no longer recognized with Live CD
 

I have made LiveCD versions of Mint17 and Ubuntu14.04 to test out the differences among the Mate,Cinnamon and Ubuntu desktops. I was able to get them all to work and each showed my external eSata WD hard drive and my network WD Live devices. I had decided which to install and, now, I can not see the eSata hdd with any of those LiveCDs. I have a usb3 Seagate which continues to show up. The esata does show up in Windows7 all the time and when i quit the installer or Live test . I have run the sudo fdisk -l and looked through out each and there is no sign of the external hdd.
I am curious because on the first run of Ubuntu and Mint, it did show up along with the usb3 device.
I have unplugged it and put it in after boot and it still didnt register at all.
sudo fdisk did list each of the internal hard drives as well as the ssd i use to hold windows 7 and boot with.
I had planned to install the Linux on that external hard drive. I was excited because it was recognized at first. No idea what to do next and searching dint give me much help other than finding 'lsusb' i think it was, but not where to put it. terminal , am guessing
in the meantime, i will be trying to do whatever else i can to have one of the live cds to boot and re recognize that esata drive. it is in a gigabyte board, ga 990fxa ud3 and a combo port esata/usb. but esata interface on the device. I have windows7 x64 professional. i had scratched a couple of terminal strings to try but got nowhere as far as showing any sign of a 2nd external drive. just the one usb3 and internal drives sda, b, c and sd1
I download and made LIveCD for linux all in one, with a few variations of ubuntu on one disc to try each. Kbuntu and Xbuntu as well as Ubuntu. the disc is for 12.04 of kbuntu and Xbuntu, i believe. On that, my Lan and external. usb/esata drives are right there. I have re tried each live cd of mint17 mate and cinnamon as well as the newest lts ubuntu 14.04. still can not find my esata/usb drive. I dont know why it shows up in one and not the others. not even on any lsusb or other suggestions i had written down prior to deciding to install. no point in installing v12. of kbuntu or xbuntu now either. not that i particularly liked either.
John

Power down, remove ac (and battery if laptop) and then press power button a few times. Then return power and boot to bios. Does it see the devices? Boot to live media, does it see devices?

Double check connections and cards maybe.

Thanks, a very good suggestion, I didnt check. but, it is in the bios and boots up in each start up. only thing i noticed is that i have it set as ahci -the other option being ide.(or raid)
I had inadvertently downloaded the 12.04 AIO ubuntu/kubuntu/xubuntu and the 14.04 AIO as trial options.
I am having problems with all of the 14.04 distro live cds. Mate, Cinnamon,and Ubuntu. However in the 12.04 AIO, i get Kubuntu and Xubuntu to load up and each shows the esata drive. xubuntu puts it right out on the desktop. i have to look in devices or drives in the Kubuntu -but the key thing is the drive shows up with out any troubles.
I think there is a problem/bug with the gigabyte board or bios and this 14.04 ubuntu and derivatives. All I wanted to do was try out Linux and how it might benefit= be easy to use with or instead of windows.
it has been a 3 day pain in the neck. I made at least 6 or maybe 8 disks with all of the live cd downloads and spent hours and hours reading and searching for methods of how to make an external drive show up so i can install to it.
i have had it, it isnt easy, not even to figure out which one might be most appropriate as all are so similar being mac or pc like in the few i tried. and , they are slow as can be probably due to the cd set up even though i have a new and fast drive still takes a half an hour to load, wait and look around and wait as the app comes up. so , cant even tell if it would be much faster as an installed OS,if i can have a newer version than 12.04 find the external drive. i have the bios option of efi, non efi and auto. i have tried all. the only other thing i came across was a usb port issue with later revisions of this gigabyte board and iommu option choice. i have 1.1. the posts i found over the past week seem to be with people on rev3 or higher. but i do not seem to have issues with any other usb devices i have plugged in. they each show up. i have iommu enabled.
thanks for your suggestion though. I may try to change the gigabyte gsata(esata) option to ide but since i have no trouble recognizing the drive in 12.04, i may not do it soon. I am fairly tired of so many failures with all of these attempts. hours a day and for days.

I am replying to my own initial post, since only jefro had much interest. I found a ton of information on the Gigabyte 990fx motherboards. in particular the 990fxa ud3, all revisions , though most posts and comments all over the place were on revisions 3 and later. I have rev1.1.
the Linux /board issues covered the realtek audio, realtek network/Ethernet as well as troubles with the usb port recognition.
I will only deal with my problem. the failure to recognize an external hard drive ,in an eSATA interface, though the board utilizes a combo usb/sata port. they call it gsata in bios
it has options in bios for ahci, ide, or RAID config.
i made changes there and found no help
I disabled IOMMU, something that is all over in google searches, but the suggestion was to *enable* IOMMU. in my rev 1.1 , i needed to disable it. now, in MINT17, at any rate, the external gsata shows up , just as it did in ubuntu 12.04 and another earlier live cd i had made last year, could have been petra, not sure
all the info suggested to enable iommu,so , i did. it was not proper for my revision
i get fine audio, i have a WD My BookLive Duo personal cloud on my LAN with a 2Tb Seagate back up in the usb port on that WD. all show up i connect to the internet, automatically through my linksys E3000 with the Realtek built in port. no troubles there, never were
I hope someone else who may have had a problem can benefit, i just disabled the IOMMU because there wasnt anything left to try. I do not have any troubles with my virtual usb ports , or didnt. I did not check. IOMMU and LInux seemed to have an issue with a virtual machine app, no idea how many or what revisions. the suggestions were to enable IOMMU though.
John

No, others are interested. They sometimes don't chime in out of being polite I'd guess. They don't want to confuse the thread maybe.

Did we get a solution to this question?

"now, I can not see the eSata hdd with any of those LiveCDs"

I have resolved the issue: disable IOMMU in this particular version of this particular board. GA990FXA UD3 rev1.1.
I was looking how to close this as 'solved'
have been working on confuguring this partition with MINT so I can remember where i will keep things here and all the other differences between how this works, terminology etc.
time runs away quicly.
thank you for your suggestion, at least it got me thinking/searching in another direction
Now, I will probably be encountering things which will generate a load of other questions
John

Works for me
 

I can confirm that this method enabled my esata on my GA-990FXA-UD3.