That's exactly my experience, but I haven't found a solution. No DVD drive will work in the four provided jacks. All the DVD/CD drives work properly, and that's how the Dell owners mnanual says to hook them up--using one of those fur jacks. I use Windows 7.
I intalled a 2nd HDD in my dell xps410 and hook the sata cable to one of the 4 open sata plugs on the mother board. Nothing happens. nothing in my computer, the device manager. nothing. The BIOS does show that all the sata ports are turned on and that there is something in that one, but windows doesnt recognize it. Though, when I unplug my dvd drive out of another sata port located on a different place on the motherbored and plug the hdd there, it works fine. Theres something about those 4 open sata ports that windows doesnt like.

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