The Mother Board

got a used dell precision t3400 and trying to boot it up on single sata drive
the options in bios sata operations is raid auto detect/achi
raid autodetect/ata and raid on
it says onboard sata drive is not present
but shows the 3 160gig sata drives and have win 7 pro 64bit up and running

The BIOS setting for storage drives should be set to 'auto', and the port for SATA 0 should be the host, if only one drive. The owner's manual will detail which ports can be used for basic OS needs, and which for RAID or other. Don't have any other drives connected, if trying just one drive, and no RAID active. But a warning.. if that drive was formatted and has an OS installed from a different system, it may not be recognized, or may go belly up if booted normally! Also in the BIOS, choose the "search other (all) boot paths" or as such worded.

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F@H.. to solve mankind's maladies.. in our lifetimes!