It's important to make clear... "not detected at bootup" could mean the BIOS didn't detect it, or it could mean the BIOS detected it but it didn't get any farther than that.

The more I think about it...

I can't imagine that even a faulty drive would fail to get detected by the BIOS. I mean, the heads could be completely crashed and the platters totally hosed and it should still at the very least get detected by the BIOS.

Anything more than that, and, well... Plugging it into a Windows laptop as the only disk drive isn't going to be able to detect or diagnose anything at all beyond that. You can't boot from an empeg disk drive, even in Linux. The drive doesn't even have a kernel on it. And even if it did, it'd be an ARM kernel, not an x86 kernel.

So there's two possible options here:

1. The laptop's BIOS doesn't even detect the drives at all. In which case, it means that you've either plugged them in wrong, or they've been fried electronically, indicating something seriously wrong with the player at an electrical level.

2. The laptop's BIOS detects the drives but can't get farther than that. This would be the expected behavior even if the drives were perfectly good. So you may have discarded three perfectly good disk drives based on this information.

So plugging into a laptop probably isn't the best diagnostic method. Anyone else in your vicinity with an empeg you could do some swapping and experimenting with?