I have recently purchased a Dell Precision T5500 Workstation and I am having difficulty installing a second hard drive. The original computer came with a single regular SATA hard drive on which I installed the Windows 10 64-bit operating system. Then I realized that Dell no longer supports the T5500 for Windows systems beyond Windows 7. I then installed an SSD in the first drive bay and moved the original hard disk to the second bay. A clean installation of Windows 7 64-bit was made on the SSD and all the Windows 7 drivers recommended by Dell were installed .The system operates satisfactorily but the second drive is not recognized in the BIOS or by Windows 7. I can switch the two drives (either loading Windows 7 or Windows 10) but only one data cable seems to work. If I start with only the second data cable connected I receive an error message that Drive 0 is missing.
In BIOS there are three SATA options: 1) Raid Autodetect / AHCI; 2) Raid Autodetect / ATA; 3) Raid on. The original setting was 'Raid on' and if I use either of the other settings Windows 7 will not load. But with either of the autodetect settings on, when I restart the computer the second hard drive is still not recognized in the BIOS. In BIOS, SATA-0 shows the recognized drive controlled by RAID BIOS; SATA-1 and SATA-2 are two DVD drives; SATA-3, SATA-4 and External SATA are all shown as empty. All of these ports are shown as "Controller- serial ATA".
The operation of RAID and SATA are mysteries to me but the symptoms are identical with the second data cable not being connected. The two data cables I am using - marked SATA 1 - come from the bottom of the tower, but there is another short SATA 1 cable, identical to the others, coming from the top of the mother board. To try that would require an extension cable.
Any suggestions?