Chosen Solution

Sorry got pulled away. Sadly I have a real job too ;-} So all of these drives are SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) and you system is a SATA II system as well so you do have the correct drives for the system, so thats not the problem here. With the one of your drives connected via the USB port reference this Apple T/N to see if your systems firmware is up to date: About EFI and SMC firmware updates for Intel-based Mac computers it should be at this level or newer. If that doesn’t fix things that puts us back to the cable I’m wondering if the logic board connector is damaged somehow or if the logic board got wet. Did you sit the system down on a wet surface or spill something awhile back? What I’m thinking here is the drives power service is messed up