Result!

I initialised and formatted the 500GB drive (in NTFS) on a different computer, and it is now recognised.

I have also got a USB2 PCI card added to add extra USB ports.

The optical drives play - but I now need to find which of my MANY copies of Nero (all came as part of a retail pack with a drive so refuse to work except with that drive) will talk to the optical drives I have in!

And hunt for a lot of software and install it - then dump a clone of the C drive in the new partition on the new drive and use the rest of that drive for data.

A while back I used to be able to format C and be back up again in 15 minutes on one of the computers - until the partition I had the Ghost of the OS and programs in corrupted.

Aiming to get back to that using a bit of Avanquest software and to back the clone up on a DVD too if I can get enough data on a DVD.

Dell still suck - it has taken me far too long to get to this stage!