Dell Hard Drive Troubles

[SkuxxTheLuxx]

Hello.

I have got 3 1TB hard drives. I decided to take a PC from my uncle that he offered to me. I booted it up, and it loads to a black screen and a little line/underscore blinking in the top left. A few minutes later, it then says no boot device avaliable. SATA 1 and 2 and 4 show none, with SATA 3 saying Installed. I've got 2 slots for the HDD's. I have taken both out, replaced them, put one in and left the other 2 out, showing no different outcomes.

Does anyone know what to do, someone been in this situation? I hear of this BIOS talk, however I've actually never known how to get there or what it is.

Startup: Shows DELL logo, F2 = Setup, F12 = Boot Options.

I've got a Windows 8.1 64-bit disc here, having a purple color style. From seeing other posts, the HDD has an OS installed inside it. Is it possible my 3 hard drives don't have an OS inside them?

Thanks.

 

[BadAsAl]

If you hit F2 you will go into the BIOS, Dell just calls it Setup. It contains a lot of information about your system and it has settings you can change depending on how you want your computer to work. Most people don't ever go in there as the factory default settings are adequate for general use of the computer.

If you do go into the BIOS you will be able to see the SATA ports and what is being reported as attached to those ports. This is one way of seeing if the hard drive is being recognized at the BIOS level (pre Windows).

It is possible the drives have an OS on them, sure. You can tell if it likely does by booting from the Windows 8.1 disk and starting setup, when you get to the point where it asks where you want to install Windows and shows the hard drives available, if the drive is partitioned with a small System Reserved partition along with 1 or more large partitions, then it probably has some kind of OS on it.
Looks something like this:
Disk0 Partition 1: System Reserved 350.0 MB System
Disk0 Partition 2: 250.0 GB

If you don't care about the data, you could then delete the partitions on the drive you want to install Windows on until it shows only unallocated space and then hit next and Windows will install.