Media Internal Not Working?

Don't think dell would disallow users to upgrade to other components. Wait till you get your new psu and go from there, hopefully the psu did not take your hdd with it. Even if you have the original os installed that came with the dell it still should be able to recognize it

Well little bit of an update, it wasn't the PSU. I used a PSU tester, and all the voltages were within the specified tolerance levels. Not sure why these drives aren't working.

are the hard drives detected in the bios?

if so try computer>manage>disk management
and see if they show up in there.

if they arent assigned a drive letter or formatted corrected they wont show up in "computer"

Use another hdd that you also know for a fact works and put it in your dell. Have your run chkdsk on that disk? Maybe for some reason your NTFS file system could be corrupted. You could also put it in a external hdd enclosure if you could get hold of one, if it's not being detected in the enclosure the drive could possibly be bad

@rand_79: I formatted it and assigned it a drive letter in my other computer, so I don't think that's the problem. and in the original post I had said I had done what you already mentioned.

@werner123: I really hope it isn't donezo. That would make 3 in 1 month, someone can't have that bad of luck, can they? Anyways, I unfortunately can't get my hands on an enclosure, thanks for the suggestion though.

Any way if it's not detected in a hdd enclosure then the drive is gone, unfortunately hdd's break it's just the way it is especially if you had valuable data stored on it. The upside they are cheap to replace, good luck!

Do your drives spin up, or sound like they are trying to?

What are their model numbers?

@fzabkar: Those puppies spin nice. Their model number is: HD103SJ.
As a sidenote, both drives were formatted for NTFS and given drive letters on my other computer, which is malfunctioning. Here's what my disk management looks like when I have 1 of the drives in:



Both drives produce the same thing. Little bit of a reminder, one drive holds my boot for win7, and the other just my media, and they both display the same way. The reason I'm doing one at a time is because my older dell computer only has 2 HDD slots.

If I were to reformat the drive(s) I would lose all the data on them, correct? Which is not what I want to do.

@Scooter92 I had a 80 gig sata drive that spinned up nicely and showed up in my bios but there was no way i could install windows on it, putting it in a external hdd enclosure also did not help, it sounded great no clicking noises nothing it was just borked, just thought i should mention this.

@werner123: That'd make it 4 HDD's in 1 month. I refuse to believe that, haha! I'll wait till the motherboard comes back to establish that. I really hope that didn't happen..  

Oh my, the problem lies between the desk and my chair. It's me! Haha, by default the SATA ports on my mobo are disabled, so while I was checking on the BIOS, I saw that and was like...what the....*enable!*

Credit goes to fzabkar. Thank you everyone for helping out so much!

Best answer selected by Scooter92.