New box, off the 'shelf'. No partitions there unless Dell put them on to
begin with. It was purchased without an O/S.
Hard drive was repartitioned during the (manual) graphic install. LVM,
separate /home /boot, etc.
It's not a laptop, it's a rackmount server. I see *nothing* in the BIOS that
could prevent me from writing to HDs. Yes, I did switch from QDMA mode on
the SATA drives to ATA, with no apparent change.
The machine has a Dell SAS 6 Host Bus Adapter. I see nothing in the
configuration there that would prevent writing to the HD.
Of course I could have missed something in the BIOS, or in the HBA setup,
but looks like I would have seen it as many times as I have been in there
looking for clues.