I look after PCs for a business, and supplied them with 8 Optiplex 3020s last spring. I believe they are all still in warranty.
Today I installed Asus GeForce GT610 graphics cards in the final 2 of these machines, having previously done the same to the other 6 without incident.
On both machines, when I then tried to boot i got the message Alert! Hard drive not found. When I looked in the bios I saw that the CD drive on SATA1 was still recognised, but not the hard drive on SATA0.
Further investigation has shown that SATA0 and SATA2 are now dead, but SATA1 is still functioning. I have therefore installed the hard drive on SATA1, and for now there is no functioning optical drive.
Because this happened to two machines at the same time, when all I had done was plugged in a new graphics card (under careful anti-static precautions), I don't believe it to be a coincidence, and it must have been caused by the graphics card install. Although I've put the same model cards in all the other machines without a problem, these cards were from a new batch.
Obviously the business does not want to be without their machines while they are returned to be looked at under warranty so I have two questions. Firstly, does anyone know what has caused this and can it be easily rectified, and secondly, if not, how do I go about getting warranty support from Dell before the warranties run out in March?
