BIOS correctly reports my 3 SATA drives as being non-RAID and under BIOS control. Booting into diagnostics however reports the "no hard drive detected" message. Everything else in diagnostics checks out out. System appears to be otherwise okay and disks are usable under Windows 7 pro 64 bit. BIOS is recent upgrade from A04 to A05. Don't know if A04 typically showed this error.
The system is new and I had been having some freezing issues. I was able to repeat the freeze/hang by streaming 6 videos and leaving it like that for several hours. I then updated all the drivers I could and setup chipset and other drivers from Dell's site. After that the "big streaming" ran for about 12 hours and did not crash. Hard to say if it is "statistically" fixed, but I'm hoping.
Remaining mystery items:
1) This error.
2) Part number for rack that allows 4 drives in spare optical bay.
3) SAS-0 & 1 ports on mother board are documented in manual as "disabled". Don't know if "disabled" means that they do not work, or if they are simply not used in the standard configuration. If they are functional might the diagnostic problem be correctly pointing out that they have no attached hard drive.
4) BIOS mentions SAS-0 & 1 and HDD 0-3 in a section talking about a mode for the SATA 0 & 1 ports. But, I have not seen any HDD 0-3 on the motherboard.
