I've had a Quantum drive that just acted like it wasn't there at all. I yanked it out in the end and had a look at the controller PCB and found that one of the chips actually had burnt out. The middle was all crumbly and there was a scorch mark where one of the legs was.
I never did work out why it blew but I replaced the drive and it worked fine for a year or so and then oddly that drive also went. This PC had a history of odd behaviour and fried hardware as the video card had died awhile back. In the end I replaced the PSU and it's been working fine ever since.

My Dell normally doesn't show anything at all apart from a big Inspiron splash screen and then it will instantly go to the Windows loading screen. It does however list what drive model it is in the BIOS setup. The only diagnostic test this would show is that the drive electronics are working and the drive isn't totally fried. I do agree that it's not very useful apart from that as the chances of the electronics being totally dead are quite remote if you've got 3 drives.

If you've plugged in the drives wrong then it quite possible that you've fried them. Laptop drives have the power at the end of the connector and if you misalign it or plug it in backwards then you can blow the controller board in the drive. I know somebody who replaced the drive in a caddy but installed it upside down. He powered it up and absolutely nothing happened. Opened it back up, install it properly and it still didn't work.

I've used a laptop IDE -> desktop IDE adapter before to copy my old 20GB to my new 60GB. I use Linux normally so I could mount it.