How do I troubleshoot SATA drives?

Do you have the jumper set up in the appropriate position?

@buckyboy28 You don’t have jumper settings on sata.

I would unplug and run one drive, and see if it’s discovered. If it boots, shutdown and connect the other one.

I don’t know what the jumpers call for, but I have tried booting with one drive unplugged each time, with the cable positions switched, and with the cables moved to entirely different sockets on the motherboard.

Are the jumpers still little metal bridges of the sort I was used to on a 386?

@pdworkin Yes, I guess that’s what you mean. IDE drives needed the jumpers to be set to Master, Slave or Cable Select. This was done by moving a small shoe to bridge two pins on the back of the drive. On sata, you don’t do that.

Could it be that your Master Boot Record (MBR) might be damaged?

It’s a first-time boot from an installation disk on CD-ROM. The drives are not available for partitioning.

That is weird. Amm, did you set your boot order to the cd-rom drive? Maybe you think it’s a silly question, but I feel I must ask. Didn’t get if you read from the cd or not.

I used a one-time boot override to boot from the cd-rom drive. If I rearranged the boot order in the BIOS so that it first looked for Drive D: it would boot the install disk.

And I don’t think SATA drives have Master/Slave jumpers.

@pdworkin No, a sata doesn’t have that.
Hmm, is there anything about SATA mode IDE mode in bios? SATA native mode?

BIOS allows me to choose enabled/disabled for disk 0 and Disk 1. It states SATA, does not offer IDE as a possible mode.

It could be just bad cable, but I swapped out a cable and that didn’t help. I haven’t swapped a power supply cable because I don’t have a spare.

What are the settings in BIOS? Is the drive set to AHCI or IDE?

It is no longer possible to tell, since the formerly intermittent video signal is now non-existent. I would say this one smells like a lemon, and I am returning it to Dell.

I feel you. Hope it works out. Bummer!